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08 Jun 2023 : The Indian Express

Editorial 1: Our Collective Pride: Let’s count the wins for queer and trans rights

Context:

  • There is existing diversity within the societies of world.  With respect to India, it  has been one of the most widely watched cases regarding queer rights in Indian history.
  • While, it is important to not lose sight of other important events that makes significant steps toward the social progress.  It is a chance to take stock of progress made and opportunities lost, and plan for a future that is more just and inclusive.


Significant judgments and events that encourages inclusiveness within the society:

  • LGBT Pride Month: June month every year is dedicated to celebration and commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride.
  • One landmark moment was the apex court’s expansion of the definition of women in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act to include transgender persons, especially trans masculine and non-binary people.
    • They are now legally entitled to avail of abortion services. In light of the increasingly restrictive abortion legislation in countries like the US, this was a judicial benchmark.
  • The apex court also took several measures to make the judicial system queer-inclusive.
    • It expanded its Gender Sensitisation and Internal Complaints Committee to include queer non-binary lawyers. It came out with a module for sensitisation of the judiciary on the LGBTQIA+ community and other small steps like creating universal restrooms in the court complex, were also much appreciated.
  • Expanding the ambit of Ayushman Bharat:
    • When it comes to the health of transgender people, the Government of India expanded the ambit of Ayushman Bharat and included transgender persons through the TG Plus card which entitles them to health and gender-affirming services.
    • An increasing number of health insurance companies are now offering spouse benefits to same-sex couples. There has also been progress in making medical curricula queer-inclusive.
  • Active efforts are made for the  political representation of transgender persons. Bobi Kinnar became Delhi’s first transgender municipal councillor, winning from Sultanpuri on an AAP ticket.
    • Sonu Kinnar, another transgender person, also made history by becoming president of Nagar Palika Panchayat of Chandauli, Uttar Pradesh.

 

NALSA Judgement:

  • Transgender Persons Act insisted on medical/surgical intervention to change gender. And further NALSA judgment paved the way for the legal recognition of transgender persons and allowed them to change their name and gender in records even without medical interventionBut in India, laws are often not implemented on the ground.
  • In a case before the Rajasthan High Court, a transgender man took his employer to court for not allowing change of name and gender in their records despite having undergone surgery. The court’s judgment not only reiterated the right of every individual to assert and affirm their identified gender but also went beyond the Transgender Act to instruct the state government to create mechanisms at the district level for grievance redressal.
  • Transgender people often face difficulty in accessing public spaces. The Karnataka government’s recent decision to allow transgender people free bus travel was much needed. It must now also focus on the safety of transgender persons in the state.

 

Way forward: The further steps that need to be taken

  • While we celebrate such successes, we must be cognisant of the pending demands of the community. There is still no central law banning unscientific, inhuman, and traumatising conversion therapy in India.
  • There is no regulation of sex-normalising surgeries for intersex children. The long pending demand of the transgender community for horizontal reservations needs sincere deliberations and actions.
  •  The Transgender Persons Act has many provisions that are yet to be realised though the rules came more than two years ago  for example, making transgender welfare boards, notifying rules, transgender protection cells, etc.
  • The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment which started the SMILE scheme for transgender people and set up a few shelter homes called Garima Grehs is facing flak for restricting funding to the existing shelters.
  • As the queer community takes pride in its existence and survival against all odds, society as a collective must ensure that every citizen enjoys the full spectrum of rights. Only then can we truly celebrate pride as a nation.

Editorial 2: During the Last Nine years of govt: In education, big plans, some key gains

Context:

  • From a new education policy that outlines the education roadmap for the next 20 years to sweeping changes in school textbooks and the opening up of the Indian higher education space to foreign players, the Government has taken several initiatives to strengthen the education system with certain criticism.

Programmes and initiatives of government to promote the education:

1. National education policy and Reform:

  • Seven years in the making, the NEP 2020 is a policy document outlining a series of reforms to be pursued in education till 20240.
  •  The NEP 2020 proposes vital shifts — from creating a system in which “children not only learn but more importantly learn how to learn” to one in which “pedagogy must evolve to make education more experiential, inquiry-driven, flexible” and In which there is “no hard separation between arts and sciences”.
  • To its credit, the policy document faced minimal political opposition, unlike many other initiatives and decisions of the Modi government. Its broader acceptance and support were attributed to the consultative approach undertaken during the drafting process.
  • After its launch in July 2020, the implementation got off to a sluggish start due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • But there has been some progress in the past year. This includes the
    • introduction of a common entrance test for central universities
    •  granting more autonomy to universities for collaborating with foreign institutions
    • engineering colleges offering BTech programs in regional languages
    • establishment of a national assessment centre to align curriculum and assessment standards across school boards, the launch of a digital storehouse for student credits, and the NIPUN Bharat scheme.
  • The NIPUN Bharat scheme aims to strengthen foundational literacy for children aged 3 to 9 years.

ABOUT NIPUN BHARAT
National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy

  1. As per NEP 2020, “the highest priority of the education system will be to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school by 2025.
  2. The rest of this Policy will become relevant for our students only if this most basic learning requirement (i.e., reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is first achieved.
  3. Accordingly, all State/UT governments will immediately prepare an implementation plan for attaining universal foundational literacy and numeracy in all primary schools, identifying stage-wise targets and goals to be achieved by 2025, and closely tracking and monitoring progress of the same”.

 

 

2.Concerns over the National Education Policy, NEP 2020

  • However, there are concerns that some of the grand announcements on NEP execution are cosmetic in nature.
  • One example is the renaming of the mid-day meal scheme as PM POSHAN without any additional funding allocation. Despite the NEP’s recommendation to include breakfast as part of the mid-day meal, the Finance Ministry rejected the Education Ministry’s proposal to implement this for pre-primary and elementary classes during the scheme’s revamp.
  • Furthermore, the relaunch of the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan Scheme, supposedly realigned with NEP suggestions, has been allocated funds significantly below the proposals made by the Education Ministry.
  • The Standing Committee on Education noted that in 2021-22, following the launch of the NEP, the scheme received an allocation of Rs 31,050 crore, while there was a demand for Rs 57,914 crore. This was when the department of school education had clearly stated that it needed Rs 19,164 crore solely for implementing NEP interventions under the Samagra Shiksha scheme.

 

3. National Curriculum Framework: 

  • Besides the NEP 2020, the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), a crucial policy document for revising textbooks and classroom pedagogy, is nearly complete.
  • On April 6 this year, the ministry released the NCF pre-draft for public feedback. Among its key recommendations are conducting board examinations twice a year, creating a semester system for Class 12 students, and providing students with the freedom to pursue a combination of science and humanities, aiming to reduce the rigid boundaries between arts, commerce, and science in classes 11 and 12 across all school boards.
  •  The final proposals of this policy document are crucial, especially considering the incumbent government’s past changes in school textbooks.

 

4. Changes in the NCERT School Textbooks: 

  • The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the apex body advising the Centre on school education, has undertaken three rounds of revisions in school textbooks with the aims of reducing the curriculum burden on students

 

5. Encouraging the setup of Foreign university within India:

  • Central government has made significant progress in liberalising higher education to accommodate foreign universities.
  • government set up committees to explore feasibility, but considerable progress was achieved only when the proposal found an endorsement in NEP 2020. Presently, the UGC is giving final touches to a regulation that would allow foreign universities to establish campuses in India that have their own admission process, the freedom to determine fee structures and recruit faculty and staff from here and abroad.
  • However, even as the UGC is finalising the specifics, government has notified regulations to facilitate the establishment of offshore campuses by foreign universities in GIFT City, Gujarat, with incentives for profit repatriation.
  • Two Australian universities — the University of Wollongong and Deakin University  have already announced their entry into India via the GIFT City route.


6. New Institutions, Enhanced Capacity: 

  • In addition to the new centrally-run educational institutions (including 7 IITs, 7 IIMs, 16 IIITs, 15 AIIMS of which 12 are partially or fully functional) set up in the last nine years, there was a significant capacity enhancement of existing institutions by way of the EWS quota.
  •  To accommodate the 10% reservation for the Economically Weaker Section (EWS), all centrally -funded educational institutions, including IITs, NITs, IIMs, central universities, IISERs, and IIITs, were asked to increase their overall student strength by 25% within two years


7. Promoting the Female representation: 

  • The last nine years have witnessed initiatives aimed at increasing female representation in traditionally male-dominated educational institutions.
  • For instance, the supernumerary seats were introduced for women at IITs and NITs in 2018, resulted in a rise in female representation from 9% in 2017 to 20% in 2022 at IITs over five years.
  • Additionally, in 2021, all 33 Sainik Schools transitioned from being all-male to admitting girl cadets, following a successful pilot in 2018.
  • According to AISHE data, there has been a reduction in gender disparity in higher education enrolment since 2014.
  • However, the pandemic year posed challenges and caused setbacks to some of the significant strides made in bridging the gender gap across various undergraduate programs.

 

Other significant changes and initiatives in education include:

  1. The no-detention policy under the Right to Education Act 2009, which guaranteed promotion through Class 1 to 8, was scrapped in 2019. After this, several states framed rules to start holding back children in classes 5 and 8.
  2. A single agency to conduct all entrance tests to higher education, the National Testing Agency, was set up in 2017.
  3. Higher Education Financing Agency or HEFA was set up in 2017 to leverage funds from the market to finance infrastructure development in educational institutions through long-term loans.

 

 

Areas of concern in the field of education during this phase:

  • Autonomy: 
    • Government has taken steps towards liberating higher education from government and regulatory control. It began with the passage of the IIM Act in 2017, which granted unprecedented levels of academic and administrative autonomy to the 20 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), including the power to appoint their chairpersons and directors.
    •  This was followed by the Institutions of Eminence (IOE) scheme in 2018, which promised significant regulatory relief for 20 higher education institutions (10 public and 10 private) to help them achieve world-class status.
    •  Furthermore, the same year, the University Grants Commission (UGC) introduced the graded autonomy scheme, which granted certain freedoms to higher education institutions (HEIs) based on specific quality benchmarks.
    • For instance, HEIs with a NAAC score of 3.51 or ranking among the top 500 in reputable world rankings were placed in ‘Category I’, allowing them to start new courses, establish off-campus centres, offer skill development courses, hire foreign faculty, and run open distance learning program
    • However, the momentum seen in the first innings seems missing in the second. After the passage of the IIM Act, which was seen as a precursor to more radical reforms in higher education, none of the other centrally-run institutions of similar
    • To date, only 48 universities (out of almost 1,000 in the country) have been placed in ‘CategoryI’ as part of the graded autonomy scheme of UGC.
  • Vacant Faculty and Leadership Positions: 
    • Shortage of teachers and vacant leadership positions have been a constant for CEIs in the last nine years.
    • Teacher recruitment efforts have only been prioritised and accelerated in a “mission mode” since September 2021, when the ministry directed all central universities and Institutions of National Importance to fill vacancies within a year.
    • According to parliamentary records, only 1,471 teachers have been hired across all central universities since the start of this recruitment drive, and approximately 6,000 positions (almost 30% of the sanctioned posts) remain unfilled.
    • Furthermore, appointment of heads of CEIs has been extremely slow, resulting in several universities and institutes of national importance operating without leaders for prolonged periods
  • To raise public spending on education to 6% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is still awaiting. In 2020, the new NEP also set the same target for the government. However, since 2015, the overall allocation towards education has been stagnant at 2.8% to 2.9% of the GDP.
  • The National Research Foundation (NRF), intended to incentivise interdisciplinary research, has not materialised despite being announced in consecutive union budget speeches from 2019 to 2021.
  • Higher Education Commission of India, intended to replace UGC and AICTE as an overarching regulator, has yet to be established even five years after its initial announcement.

 

Conclusion:

  • Qualitative education is essential part for development of human capital. In order to that Government has taken certain initiatives in this direction such as framing the National Education policy 2020, promoting the foreign university to set up campus in India, enhancing female representation along with autonomy to institutions.
  • However, there are certain areas which need to be focused such as Shortage of teachers and vacant leadership positions, educational infrastructure and share of investment in the education as 6% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) .