‘Carnage’ of India’s public education system must end: Sonia Gandhi-OxBig News Network

Congress leader Sonia Gandhi on Monday slammed the Modi government’s education policy, accusing it of centralising power, commercialising education, and communalising textbooks.

Noting that these three Cs haunt Indian education today, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson said in an article that this “carnage” of India’s public education system must end.

According to an article titled “The ‘3Cs’ That Haunt Indian Education Today” in The Hindu, Gandhi said the introduction of the 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, the commercial outsourcing of education to the private sector, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions,” she said.

Gandhi charged that “unchecked centralisation” has been the hallmark of this government’s functioning over the last 11 years, but its most damaging consequences have been in the domain of education. The Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), comprising Union and state education ministers, has not been convened since September 2019, she noted.

“The lack of dialogue is accompanied by a bullying tendency. Among the most disgraceful acts committed by this government is the coercion of state governments to implement the PM Schools for Rising India (PM-SHRI) scheme by withholding the grants under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA),” she said.

Referring to the draft 2025 University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines as “draconian”, she accused the government of sidelining state governments in the appointment of vice-chancellors in state universities.

The former Congress president also alleged that the Modi government’s commercialisation of the education system has been happening in plain sight, in full compliance with the NEP.

She claimed 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.

In higher education, the government has introduced the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) as a replacement to the University Grants Commission’s erstwhile system of block-grants, she said.

“The Union government’s third thrust is on communalisation, the fulfilment of the long-standing ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, of indoctrinating and cultivating hatred through the education system,” the Rajya Sabha MP said.

She alleged that 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 said.

“In our universities, we have seen the large-scale hiring of professors from regime-friendly ideologically backgrounds, no matter the comically poor quality of their teaching and scholarships,” she said, claiming that leadership positions in key institutions even in IITs and IIMs have been reserved for “pliant ideologues”.

Over the last decade, she said, the education systems have been systematically cleansed of the spirit of public service and education policy has been sanitised of any concerns about access to and the quality of education.

“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,” Gandhi said in the article.