Distinguished Invited Talk on ‘New Education Policy – 2020: Issues and Challenges’ at KISS

The Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), KISS-DU organized a distinguished invited talk on ‘New Education Policy – 2020: Issues and Challenges’ on 1^st April 2022. The talk was delivered by distinguished invited speaker Prof. Dr. E Balagurusamy, ME (Hons) Ph.D. Ded, FIE, FIETE CEng, Chairman, EBG Foundation, Coimbatore. Prof. Balagurusamy also serves as member of the High-Level Committee on School Education of Tamil Nadu Government and Chairman of the Committee for Development of Text Books on Science and Technology in Higher Education. He shares the credit of establishing several Centres of Excellence and building and developing institutions from concept level.

In his deliberation, Prof. Balagurusamy said that a country requires a span of twenty-five to forty years to reach the state of development. He identified that lack of proper standards of education at all levels is the reason for India still being under-developed even after seventy-five years of its independence.

Prof. Balagurusamy dwelt upon quite a few disturbing global statistical indices such as the Human Development Index in which India stands at 130 which is much lower than countries like China, Mexico, and Malaysia. As regards the Global Innovation Index, India stands lower than Korea, China and Malaysia. In respect of some key parameters like Gross National Happiness Index, Global Peace Index, Global Hunger Index, Social Progress Index, Research Output, Patents Registered, India presents a dismal scenario, he added. All this can be attributed to the poor quality of education at all levels in India. Prof. Balagurusamy expressed the need for revamping the entire system of education through the New Education Policy 2020, which is the recent most and eighth exercise in addition to already existing reports and recommendations made by the Radhakrishnan Commission, Mudaliar Commission, Kothari Commission, the National Policy on Education during the time of Rajiv Gandhi.

Furthermore, Prof. Balaguruswamy brought to light the historical facts in order to emphasize a key point that policies are good per se, but they lack proper implementation. Citing instances, he said that despite recommendations including the present NEP 2020 that 6% of the GDP be spent on education, it is yet to be implemented. He also spoke at length on some salient features of NEP 2020. He added that it is a unified policy covering school, college and university phases of teaching-learning. Speaking in the context of Higher Education, Prof. Balagurursamy focused on the classification of universities and colleges as research-intensive, teaching-intensive and autonomous degree-granting colleges. He also spoke about multiple exit and multiple entry provisions in the undergraduate and postgraduate levels; multi-disciplinarity of education, provision of Academic Bank of Credits and the like.

Professor Deepak Kumar Behera, Vice-Chancellor, KISS-DU; Dr. Kanhu Charan Mahali, IPS (Retired), Director General; and Professor Jugal Kishore Mishra, Director, Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), KISS-DU also spoke on the occasion.