Dharmendra Pradhan’s exit as Education Minister has been under a cloud, but his five-year tenure was marked by a ramping up of efforts to implement the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which the Union Cabinet had accepted a year before he took charge.
Earlier, at the Petroleum Ministry, he had made his mark on programme implementation by delivering eight crore LPG connections to poor households in three years against a four-year target.
From the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), flexible learning and multidisciplinarity, and the Vikshit Bharat Shiksha Abhiyan (VBSA) replacing the UGC in higher education, to PM SHRI, the three-language formula and new teacher-training initiatives in school education, his Ministry was constantly in the news introducing “reforms”.
Common threads ran through them: performance evaluation and accountability, skilling-education convergence, promotion of a certain vision of Indianness, ambition undercut by implementation challenges, and a push for uniformity that critics called centralisation and a disregard for diversity.
Almost all remain works-in-progress that the new Education Minister will have to carry forward.
Dharmendra Pradhan’s exit as Education Minister has been under a cloud, but his five-year tenure was marked by a ramping up of efforts to implement the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which the Union Cabinet had accepted a year before he took charge. Earlier, at the Petroleum Ministry, he had made his mark on programme implementation by delivering eight crore LPG connections to poor households in three years against a four-year target.
From the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), flexible learning and multidisciplinarity, and the Vikshit Bharat Shiksha Abhiyan (VBSA) replacing the UGC in higher education, to PM SHRI, the three-language formula and new teacher-training initiatives in school education, his Ministry was constantly in the news introducing “reforms”. Common threads ran through them: performance evaluation and accountability, skilling-education convergence, promotion of a certain vision of Indianness, ambition undercut by implementation challenges, and a push for uniformity that critics called centralisation and a disregard for diversity. Almost all remain works-in-progress that the new Education Minister will have to carry forward.
