Former bureaucrat Anil Swaroop expresses concern over country’s education system

Former bureaucrat Anil Swaroop has expressed his worries over the country’s education system.

Swaroop, former Secretary, School Education & Coal, and Founder Chairman of ‘Nexus of Good’ was speaking to Kailashnath Adhikari, MD, Governance Now, in a webinar organized by the public policy and governance analysis platform.

During the conversation Swaroop said that after a month of taking over as Education Secretary when someone asked his opinion of the sector, “I said in the coal sector, mining was underground but mafia was over ground. But in education, all mafia is underground, eating into the essentials of Indian system.”

He recalled that at the education department they took over the better of mafia and even had to sacrifice one of their senior IAS officers. But the point was driven home. Swaroop said that the biggest mafia in school education is of B. Ed and D. Ed colleges and the new education policy without naming the mafia tries to eliminate them.

“There are 16000 B.Ed and D.Ed colleges in India of which 4000 exist only on paper. We took on this mafia and almost settled them but for the intervention of courts which forced an IAS officer to resign. The policy picks up from here and has integrated these courses into a four year course. Now all these fraudulent colleges will have to shut down. Similarly teachers entrance test… a former chief minister is behind bars… .... the policy says it will revamp teacher entrance test. It aims to address some of those mafias,” he said.

Giving the example of coal shortage, which led to the coal mafia, Swaroop said the coal mafia existed not for anything but shortage... there was no shortage… In education too you go into the cause of the problem and fortunately policy addresses some of those aspects. The former school education secretary said that though the new education policy is a visionary document but asked where the allocated money of 6% of the GDP will come from.

‘‘For an idea to fructify and sustain it has to be politically acceptable, socially desirable, technologically feasible, financially viable, administratively doable and judicially tenable. As far as financial viability is concerned there is no money. Secondly, at the conceptual level the policy should have encouraged private sector education which it does not and thirdly there is only a passing reference to the phenomenal role played by NGOs,” Swaroop added.