Looking on the rural side

Everyone looks at the draft New Education Policy (NEP) from an individual perspective and puts forth comments, criticism, observations and even condemnation. There are a few who outrightly rejected the draft by saying that it is meant for privatisation and commercialisation of education. Perspective varies from individual to individual and organisation to organisation. As a teacher, researcher and outreach activist who served in a Gandhian Institution well over two and half decades, and worked with both Centre and state governments for more than three decades in the domain of Rural Development, I have gone through the document carefully in the backdrop of the Gandhian Framework of Education.

Education is fundamentally a process by which human beings are shaped and transformed as their better selves for higher-level activities. Human beings are transformational in character and they are having the resilience to evolve themselves as individuals with higher qualities and values. Hence, people have to be transformed as evolving individuals and education has to play a crucial and significant role there. Any educational exercise would change the human being's attitude, behaviour, skill, capacity and capability. Thus, it is a man-making process. It has to help individuals to evolve themselves and at the same time, help them to earn their livelihood. It has to help people become active citizens and they should become independent in shaping their destiny by managing their affairs. If that purpose is being served through the educational process, both the state and society would be less burdened. In order to ensure the above, India is continuously trying from the dawn of independence.

But Gandhi specifically looked at India and observed that 80 per cent of people in India are in rural areas and they are the real faces of India. Hence, transforming them is the new task of the new government. But it is not the task of State alone. The transformation task has to be done by the community through its volunteers. The volunteers have to be prepared and trained. To do that task, a large number of institutions have to be created. These institutions have to work with the community for rural transformation. They are called rural institutes. Fundamentally, they are different from conventional higher learning institutions. Rural community includes the pastoral, farming, tribal, craft, fishing and trading communities, living with their skill, culture, knowledge, language, spiritual and livelihood practices. To transform them, a new education framework had been evolved and advocated by Gandhi called "Naitalim" or New Education. It relied on the knowledge and skill base of the people well-rooted in the Indian ethos of education.

After independence, instead of taking a new path in educating masses in Gandhian framework of education, the new government followed footsteps of the British colonial masters by giving a small space for experimenting Gandhi's educational framework. As a result, the whole educational system concentrated much on preparing students for urban industrial needs and neglecting the rural masses and their transformational needs. Even Gandhi's educational framework has also been diluted over a period of time. The space provided for experimenting with the educational process and procedures followed in the country in the past seven decades enabled the urbanities to exploit the rural masses. Hence, all communities in rural areas are in deep crises. The economic globalisation has intensified the rural crises and the village life is moving towards its natural death.

Against this background, I look at the draft of the new education policy. Substantially, it tries to address the problems in the existing framework of education meant for preparing youth for market and industry. But it does not make any attempt to address the issues of the rural masses through the new education policy. This document did not make any serious attempt to establish linkage between academia and the community for meaningful outreach activities to be done in the rural areas by students and teachers. Equally, it did not spell out the framework to build citizenship among students. I feel that the government has to evolve a new rural education policy and it has to be integrated into the education policy; that is the need of the hour.

(The author is a former Professor and Rajiv Gandhi Chair for Panchayati Raj Studies, Gandhigram Rural Institute. The views expressed are strictly personal)