NEW DELHI: Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) Chairperson and Rajya Sabha MP Sonia Gandhi has criticised the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, highlighting the “3Cs” that she claims are haunting the Indian education system.
Centralisation of power with the Union Government, commercialisation and outsourcing of educational investments to the private sector, and communalisation of textbooks, curricula, and institutions were the “3Cs” the CPP Chairperson pointed out.
In her article published by a leading English daily, Ms Gandhi said the three-point agenda of the Narendra Modi government is leading to damaging consequences in the domain of education.
“The introduction of the high-profile National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has hidden the reality of a government that is profoundly indifferent to the education of India’s children and youth. The Union Government’s track record over the last decade has convincingly demonstrated that in education, it is concerned only with the successful implementation of three core agenda items—the centralisation of power with the Union Government; the commercialisation and outsourcing of investments in education to the private sector; and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions,” she wrote in the article shared on Monday by the Congress on X.
Accusing the government of coercing state governments, Gandhi said that withholding funds under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan was one of the most disgraceful acts of the ruling regime.
“Among the most disgraceful acts committed by this Government is the coercion of State governments to implement the PM-SHRI (or PM Schools for Rising India) scheme of model schools by withholding the grants due to them under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) as leverage,” she said.
Notably, Congress ally in Tamil Nadu, the DMK, has also raised the issue of SSA funds after Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan apparently said that the state would have to fully implement the new education policy in order to receive SSA funds.
This snowballed into a bigger controversy, with Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin accusing the Centre of trying to impose Hindi in the Dravidian state.
Withholding these funds, said Gandhi, was a flagrant violation of constitutional morality.
“These funds have been due to States for years as part of the financial support required to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, which came into force in 2010. These actions betray the motivations of a government that cares more about posturing and pursuing publicity than upholding the constitutionally guaranteed Right to Education. It is a flagrant violation of constitutional morality, and in its 363rd Report, even the bipartisan Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports has called for the unconditional release of the SSA funds to State governments,” she stated.
She further slammed the Modi government over the commercialisation of the education system and raised concerns over the large-scale shutdown of public schools.
“The Narendra Modi government’s commercialisation of the education system has been happening in plain sight, in full compliance with the NEP… Since 2014, we have seen the closure and consolidation of 89,441 public schools across the country—and the establishment of 42,944 additional private schools. The country’s poor have been forced out of public education and into the hands of a prohibitively expensive and under-regulated private school system,” the Congress leader said.
Sonia Gandhi also criticised the alleged communalisation of school curricula, terming it a long-standing ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party to indoctrinate and cultivate hatred through the education system.
“Textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the backbone of the school curriculum, have been revised with the intention of sanitising Indian history. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the sections on Mughal India have been dropped from curricula. In addition, the Preamble to the Indian Constitution was dropped from textbooks until public backlash forced the Government to commit to mandatory inclusion once again,” she wrote.
Over the last decade, Ms Gandhi said, the education system has been systematically cleansed of the spirit of public service, and education policy has been sanitised of any concerns about access and quality.
“The consequences of this single-minded push for centralisation, commercialisation, and communalisation have fallen squarely on our students. This carnage of India’s public education system must end,” she noted.