With the intention of implementing the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 by the next academic year, the State government has constituted a committee to examine the policy that was released in July this year and to prepare for Goa its own policy and roadmap in higher education. This committee will be chaired by former chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar, a teacher by profession who has held the education portfolio, and will have 26 others as members, including educationists and others. The government has acted quickly in constituting the committee, a quality that has rarely been seen in this government or the previous one, so it is likely that it intends to take this forward.
But, there are worries. When the NEP was released in July, it had raised in Goa the issue of the medium of instruction policy that for long has been a contentious issue as the national policy recommends the home language/mother tongue/local language/regional language as the medium of instruction at least until Grade 5, but at least until Grade 8. This was met with appreciation by some and in other quaretrs with some reservation. This was expected, but this question of medium of instruction has to be settled for all time so that Goa can look forward to raising the standard of education in the State.
Currently, education in Goa is definitely in need of urgent reforms and the NEP can be the basic framework on which to model the State policy. The committee, however, has to take into consideration the unique points of Goa when framing the roadmap for higher education. As the Parsekar committee takes upon the task of formulating the policy for higher education in Goa, it is pertinent to ask what did happen to the Bhaskar Nayak Committee report on the medium of education at primary level. The committee was constituted in 2016, and submitted its report in January 2019, but over a year and a half later the contents of the report are yet to be made public.
There has been no decision taken on accepting the Nayak report, and till the present time the contents of the report are not known. If the government was serious about education, especially the medium of instruction, then it surely would not have kept the contents of the report under wraps. The purpose of appointing a committee is defeated if the reports that are presented to the governemnt are left unopened. In this particular case, the medium of instruction is an important issue in Goa, so keeping the report in cold starage doesn’t help in any which way. Hours of work went into preparing the report, and there were consultations held with a large number of people to prepare it.
The question of why the Nayak report is now pertinent is simple. The Parsekar-led committee will be looking at higher education, which now makes the Nayak Committee report significant as it was specific to the primary level and its terms of reference included making recommendations towards improving the standard of education in the State. We need to know what those suggestions that have been made are. If there are to be reforms at the higher education level, they have to be based on the status of education at the primary level. You can’t have improved higher education, if the base at the primary education does not prepare students for it.
Goa’s aim, and hence the Parsekar committee’s task, should be to improve higher education in Goa. Currently, Goa not only lacks institutions with specialised courses across streams, it also has just a few colleges that can stand up and be counted as competitors at the national level. All this has to change if Goa intends that its youth are going to have a better tomorrow.
