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Critical to have confidence of states to advance vision of NEP: Parliamentary panel

Critical to have confidence of states to advance vision of NEP: Parliamentary panel

Indian Express3 days ago
It is critical to have complete confidence in states to successfully advance the vision of the new National Education Policy (NEP), and the Ministry of Education should develop a mechanism to coordinate with them on any concerns flagged, a Parliamentary panel has noted.
The Department-related Parliamentary Women, Standing Committee on Education, Sabha Children, Youth and Sports, headed by Congress MP Digvijay Singh, also noted the absence of an organised institutional mechanism to gather feedback on the NEP's implementation.
It is recommended that a centralised nationwide tracker at the university level should be developed to track progress on NEP implementation in higher education.
'The Committee has observed that a synergised collaboration between stakeholders is required for the successful implementation of the NEP. 'In response, the Ministry has rightly noted that Education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution. It is therefore critical to have the complete confidence of the states to successfully advance the vision of the NEP,' the panel said in its report.
'However, the Ministry's answer has not touched on the modalities as to how the Union Government is working with state governments that have expressed reservations about various elements of the NEP in Higher Education.
'Hence, the Committee thinks that the Ministry must develop a mechanism to coordinate with states on any such concerns that they may have shared,' it added. The panel flagged the absence of an organised institutional mechanism to gather feedback on the NEP's implementation. '…it has been left entirely to universities, and no clear channel appears to be identified for universities to share this feedback. This is uncalled for, given the importance of the NEP in shaping the future of the country.
'The committee reiterates, in the strongest possible terms, the need for a formal feedback mechanism from all stakeholders to provide input and suggest policy improvements,' the report said.
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The Fight for the Republic: Sitaram Yechury's Critical Analysis of Hindutva and RSS
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The Fight for the Republic: Sitaram Yechury's Critical Analysis of Hindutva and RSS

Published : Aug 15, 2025 08:48 IST - 9 MINS READ How does one contribute to the fight to preserve the secular-democratic character of India? The first step would be to understand the very movements that seek to undermine the basic values upheld by the Constitution. Understanding these movements will require one to understand their worldview—what drives those movements, and what their vision of future society is. Sitaram Yechury's The Fight for the Republic is one that eminently serves this purpose by providing a trenchant critique of the RSS and its affiliated organisations, including the BJP. The book, published after Yechury's untimely demise in September 2024, is a collection of three essays that had been published separately earlier. The collection has been introduced by the renowned economist and thinker Prabhat Patnaik, who was also Yechury's professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 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Guruji's guru Golwalkar, whom RSS men consider their 'Guruji', projects the path followed by Nazi Germany as the model to be followed to 'deal' with 'foreign races': 'To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the semitic race—the Jews… Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the roots, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.' Yechury writes: 'Hitler thus emerges as the 'Guruji's guru'.' In his book, Golwalkar uses the terms 'Hindu' and 'Aryan race' synonymously. To bolster his argument that non-Hindu Indians are 'foreign races', he claims that Aryans originated in India and did not migrate to India from elsewhere, dismissing all historical evidence to the contrary. 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India at 75 The third essay in this book, titled 'India at 75', was written in 2021, by which time the Hindutva forces were well-entrenched in power. The essay begins by discussing the 'new narrative' being scripted to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra, a narrative which claims that India did not win freedom on August 15, 1947, but with the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2019, and the commencement of the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya on August 5, 2020. This narrative is the product of a long struggle, going back to the time of the national movement for Independence, between contending political-ideological visions. The mainstream Congress vision was that independent India should be a secular-democratic republic. The Communist vision, while agreeing with this aim, argued that political freedom must be extended to the socio-economic realm as well, and that it would be possible only under socialism. 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