In olden times, accumulation and dissemination of skill-based knowledge systems created a conducive environment. We must get back to roots
For about a year, some parts of the draft National Education Policy, 2016 has been there on the website of the Ministry of Human Resource Development for everybody to see. A lot of consultation at various levels is said to have taken place before the draft was prepared by the TSR Subramanian committee, which has made some significant observations before it goes to propose some 90 recommendations to set the chaotic house of Indian education system in order.
One of the striking observations happens to be that the required focus on the teachers has been conspicuous by its absence in both school and higher level education across the country. The governance model, which our educational institutions and regulatory bodies have developed, is fraught with such fissures and inherent contradictions that it fails to pay the kind of attention that requires to be there for recruitment as well as career enhancement of regular, quality teachers, who can effectively contribute towards the project of nation-building that actually takes place in classrooms to a great extent.
The committee’s genuine indictment, that over the years increasingly less importance has been attached with teachers who have been virtually ignored and put on the backburner in the existing regulatory frameworks of educational sector, is particularly pertinent in the context of Delhi University.
Under prevailing circumstances in this premier university, majority of teachers have been helplessly teaching on an ad hoc basis for years with uncertainty lying all around their academic and personal lives — a sizeable section of regular teachers have been waiting for promotions and almost equally sizeable section of retired teachers have so far been bereft of their pensions at that stage of their life when they hardly have any other financial assistance at their command.
Permanent appointments, promotions and pensions are the issues that bother not just individual teachers concerned but the teaching community as a whole. There is a common thread that connects all these teachers, who have suffered badly either because of no regular appointments or delayed promotion and pensions. They all have been subjected to inexplicable discrimination in one way or the other.
There have been many protest marches, dharna, hunger strikes, even candle-light marches to draw the attention of the civil society, university administration and the successive Governments at the Centre, towards the kind of discrimination that has generated a great deal of demoralising impact on the teachers alongside creating ruptures in the routine functioning of the institution itself.
Despite all these protest marches and so on and so forth, which was followed by many rounds of negotiations and dialogues with the authorities concerned, these issues are yet to be fully resolved. Teachers are really angry and upset about the fact that their grievances have not been addressed the way they should have been long ago. These teachers and their representative activists from the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) fear and anticipate that such indifference or apathy, whatever it may be, signifies the withdrawal symptom of the State from the domain of higher education.
If their fear is not misplaced, it is a matter of worry. The nation-state has to be there in the field of higher education in a decisive way. It needs to play a central role in supporting and sustaining the public funded institutions for common good of the country.
Historical sources suggest the fact that teachers in ancient India through creation, accumulation and dissemination of advanced and skill-based knowledge systems created a highly conducive environment in which the tools and techniques for plastic and cataract surgery were available in our country.
Not only hospitals for human beings but also birds and animals were running in a professional way much before the advent of Jesus Christ.
Moreover, it was the existing knowledge systems which Bhaskaracharya, the second refined to generate a new branch of mathematics, namely Calculus, about 500 years before the phenomenon called Isaac Newton. It was nothing else but the existence of excellent knowledge systems that enabled teachers like Chanakya to successfully contribute to the making of a powerful, political empire based on the integration of skills, insights, information and wisdom of teachers with the need and requirement of the then society.
last but not the least, India was consistently the single largest contributor to the global gross domestic product till the 17th century due to the utmost importance attached with knowledge-based economic structures. There is no need to underline these facts for any kind of nationalistic chauvinism. The point being made is that academics play an extremely significant role for the economic health and happiness of our country.
For the vision of shrestha Bharat with Sabka saath, sabka vikas to translate into a distinctly visible reality, our governance models and educational networks can no longer afford to ignore the indispensability of quality, regular teachers (not part-time ad hoc teachers) who have then to be responsible and accountable to either perform or perish for the making of such vibrant India where skilled and knowledge-based cultures alone will be encouraged for teaching-learning activities with the help of the state of the art pedagogical practices.