Sonia Gandhi Urges End to Public Education ‘Carnage’

New Delhi, Mar 31 

 Sonia Gandhi, Congress leader, denounced the Modi government's education policy on Monday as one whose priority is centralization of power, commercialization of education, and outsourcing of investment to private industry, in addition to the propagation of communal perception in textbooks.

She explained that these three concerns, which she refers to as the "three Cs," are Indian education's worries at the moment. According to her article, she explained that this "destruction" of India's public school system must cease.

In her article entitled "The '3Cs' that haunt Indian education today" in The Hindu, Gandhi contended that the promulgation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has overshadowed the truth of a government that does not care much about the education of children and youths in India.

"The actions of the Union Government in the last decade clearly indicate that in education it is concerned only about three objectives: centralization of power in the Union Government, making education a business by contracting investments to the private sector, and propagating communal concepts in textbooks, curriculum, and educational institutions," she said.

Gandhi charged the government with "unchecked centralization," which she opines has been a dominant feature of its functioning in the past 11 years, with the worst impact being felt in the field of education.

She stated that the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) comprising education ministers of the Union and state governments has not been convened since September 2019.

Even as it brings about drastic changes in education through the NEP 2020, the government has not taken state governments into confidence on these policies whatsoever, she noted.

"This indicates the Government's keenness to disregard any views other than its own, even on an issue that is clearly defined in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution," she stated in her article.

Lack of discussion is accompanied by a bullying propensity. Among the most deplorable acts of this government is compelling state governments to implement the PM-SHRI (or PM Schools for Rising India) scheme for model schools by way of withholding their grants under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) as leverage, she said.

She also condemned the suggested University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines for 2025 as "harsh" and contended that they entirely bar state governments from exercising any influence in the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in universities that they have founded, financed, and operated.

She charged the Union government with taking unto itself, through governors who are typically chancellors of universities, nearly absolute authority over the appointment of vice-chancellors in state universities.

"This is an insidious method to make a collaborative responsibility an exclusive domain of the Union government, which represents a grave threat to federalism today," she said.

The former Congress president asserted that the Narendra Modi government's commodification of education, facilitated by the National Education Policy (NEP), is transparent. She argued that this policy has forced the poor from public schools into underfunded and costly private institutions.

In higher education, the government has substituted the earlier block-grant system of the University Grants Commission with the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA), she added.

"The third thrust of the Union government is that it wants to push communalism, which falls into line with the long-term aspirations of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party to expand indoctrination and create venom in the school system," Rajya Sabha member said.

The textbooks of National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which form a part of the school syllabus, have been altered with a view to sanitizing Indian history, she asserted.

"Material such as the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and sections concerning Mughal India has been excised from the curriculum. In addition, the Preamble to the Indian Constitution was removed from textbooks until public protest forced the Government to promise to replace it," she added.

"In our universities, there has been a huge influx of recruitment of professors who belong to the government's ideology, no matter how bad their research and teaching might be," she said, going on to mention that leadership positions in key institutions, such as IITs and IIMs, have been assigned to individuals who believe in the government's ideology.

According to her, the education system over the last decade shifted away from public service, and education policies ignored access and quality. She argued that the consequences of centralization, commercialization, and communalization have negatively impacted students, and that the dismantling of India's public education system must cease.