Nationalisation of Education System

The education system in India has got one more weapon in its armoury with the enforcement of  “The Right to Education Act” in 2010. This act ensures that all children between the age group of 6-14 years irrespective of gender and social category get the education. After the enforcement of this act, the right to education will be accorded the same legal status as the right to life as provided by Article 21A of the Indian Constitution. It is a welcome step towards the goal of achieving cent per cent literacy and nurturing our children and young people with the “right” kind of education. Here comes the question mark with the word “right”.

Although enactment and enforcement of right to education is a welcome step towards the goal of achieving cent per cent literacy in the country yet there are a number of long creeping flaws in the education system of India, if we go by the records of last sixty years i.e the time since India got independence and declared itself a sovereign, socialist republic.

At the time of enforcement of Indian constitution in 1950, some sixty years down the line the education as a subject was accorded utmost importance and rightly put into the “state list” so that the respective state government can have a close look in the matters of education. It was done with a thought that “education builds the man who in turn builds the nation” and we were on the verge of embarking on the way to build our nation at that particular time.

Now almost sixty years down the line the question arises, whether we have achieved the goal we set for over selves on the subject of education? The most likely answer to this question is a resounding No, definitely not. Even after sixty years of Independence and self-governance, we cannot appreciate our self on the educational front. But this is not the cause of worry; the problem is that we are not concerned about this failure of not providing quality education to our kids that can make them self-reliant. In fact, we are not taking it seriously. We are not looking for the reason behind this, which is more detrimental; it gives us food for thought. Diagnose of the problems is must for its cure. Every decision taken in the past should be reviewed rationally to get to the ultimate cause of concern.

The subject of education was put in the “state list” keeping in view the diversity and the cultural & ethnic difference in the different states of India.  It was thought that the respective state government will be able to monitor the process of education at the micro level and provide quality education. But it has not been the case worse than that the standard or the quality of education has been well below par and the downward trend is still continued. This has been proved more than once by various scholars with concrete evidence of the downfall of the Indian education system. Apathy of various state government and their lack of imagination and innovative ideas has  turned Indian Education system into an inferior quality school education system; where there is discrimination between children’s whose parents are rich and children’s whose parents are poor, children who reside in the rural area and those who live in metros and other developed cities. And this gap is widening with every new day. To plug this gap and stop the downslide we need a concrete education policy- both at elementary and higher level to radically transform education in India.  

We want an educational set up that could produce not just a few bureaucrats to the government, software engineers to the IT companies some highly paid managers to the multinationals some engineers and science graduates as researchers to the foreign universities but some good innovative entrepreneurs who could be themselves self-reliant.

The record shows that these kind of the few produced in India are from the National Institutes like IIT’s,  IIM’s, IIMC’s and IIFT’s. There are hardly any that could justify the diverse state wise education system adopted by India.  

It seems here we went wrong i.e in empowering the state government to handle the issue of education. It is the right time to Nationalize the education system and make it uniform throughout the country so that needful could be done in a comprehensive manner to provide the quality education to country’s younger brigade to make them self-reliant as well as globally competitive. The Right to Education Bill is one such step, although a small initiative, to provide access as well as quality education to all children irrespective of caste and class.

Nationalized education is the only solution to this deep-rooted problem as individual state government or private bodies can neither provide the infrastructure nor quality educators the minimum must to get this education system out of this rut.

Although more than 93 per cent of all education, in any case, is being provided by the government it is not well organized or streamlined in the sense it should be to provide the results. Putting up schools, invest money, give computers to everybody only cannot improve the overall system. A Nationalize educational policy is must change the system radically. And it can be effectively implemented throughout the country if the education system is Nationalised. The people in power in the Centre Government should not run from their responsibility of providing quality education to the children of the country by saying that it is the responsibility of the state, this is a state subject. The states have to recruit trained teachers, they have to provide infrastructure etc. etc.   In fact, this blame game can be stopped only by adopting a National Education policy applicable for the whole of the country.

Although for the first time through a parliamentary legislation the Central Government have set standards of qualification of teachers. But this should only be a beginning in the direction of more nationalized policies and not be an isolated act. This is the right step towards rectifying the problem. It is a fact nothing can be changed overnight but a beginning in the right direction is all that required.