Our Education Policy May Falter on ‘Executive Overload’

Context: While immediate excitement over the government’s plan to overhaul India’s education system may be welcomed, the underlying ability of the state to implement what it wishes to do warrants circumspection.

Issues with Indian Policymaking:

• Chronic Implementation curse: Policies are rarely written for actual constraints of implementations.

• Bureaucratic Overload: which takes place when “local bureaucrats remain heavily under-resourced relative to their responsibilities. It has two sub-features denoting a weak state capacity.

• Officials with fewer resources are worse off in implementing rural development schemes;
• Fewer resources are provided to administrative units where the political responsibility for implementation is less clear.
• Political Differences: “political” blame game among parties and Union, state and local governments proves as a hurdle in effective policymaking.

Issues with the New Education Policy (NEP):

• Missed the underlying reality of Weak State Capacity: The fragmentation of State authority, poor accountability, and an under-allocation of desired financial resources.

• Greater Imposition of Control: 

• The setting up of a national higher education body makes one wonder if the NEP’s new measures would become tools for the exercise of greater political control over universities.
• The National Research Fund could also become a tool for ideological impositions on educational institutions.

• Lofty goals of expenditure: The NEP’s call for 6% of gross domestic product equivalent of annual expenditure on (higher) sounds a bit too ambitious.

• Concerns of unequal access to quality education: given India’s sharp socioeconomic disparities, which have worsened during the pandemic, have not been covered.

Way Forward:

• Aligning Politics of Ambition with a Progressive Implementation Roadmap: 
• For E.g.  a GPS navigation map, for executive agencies to follow and a feedback system in place for better compliance.

• Scrutinize the implication of the policy on marginalized sections:

• The issues related to Reservation should be discussed concerning affirmative actions needed in a highly differentiated socio-economic milieu.

Conclusion: It might be a good idea to have independent policy assessments every year to understand the specific ailments afflicting the executive’s policy implementation at the ground level.