Headlines
National education policy to be prepared with opinion of all: Irani
Agartala, Sep 19
Union Human Resource
Development Minister Smriti Irani has said a joint effort has been
initiated from the national to the grassroots level to obtain opinion to
formulate a national education policy.
"This is for the first
time citizen of India at large from national to grassroots level would
give their opinion in preparing the national education policy. The draft
of the policy would be ready by December," Irani told reporters on
Friday night after meeting Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar.
She
said: "The first regional meeting covering all the eight northeastern
states held in Agartala Friday. The education ministers and
representatives of these states gave their views on the proposed
national education policy."
The minister, who left for Delhi on
Saturday, said the gram panchayat level to district, state to national
level consultation on the education policy already begun across the
country and the response was very enlightening.
On Friday,
addressing the students and teachers of the National Institute of
Technology (NIT), Agartala, she said to obtain experiences and expertise
by the IIT and NIT students from world famous scientist, academician
and technical experts, the MHRD has recently launched a scheme 'GIAN'
(Global Initiative of Academic Network).
She asked the institute to provide a list of foreign experts, who can be invited.
"The
travel and other cost of the guest expert would be borne by my ministry
and the deliberations would be video recorded for future use by the
students," she announced.
Irani also asked the all concerned to
share experience among the students of various NITs and IITs of the
country and requested the NIT students to share their experience,
knowledge and inventions with the people living adjoining the villages
of their institute.
She also announced that a web portal
"e-soudh-sindhu" would be launched by January next year and over 90,000
e-books and 10,000 journals of across the world would be available in
the plat form.
The minister accompanied by HRD Secretary V.S.
Oberoi (Higher Education) and S.C. Khuntia (School Education) held a
meeting here on Friday with the education ministers of the northeast
states to discuss the proposed national education policy.
Tripura
Education Minister Tapan Chakraborty said the Friday's meeting was held
as the follow up meeting of the 63rd meeting of the Central Advisory
Board of Education (CABE) that was held in New Delhi on August 19.
He
told reporters that in the CABE meeting, most northeast states wanted
to remove the 'no-detention policy' at the elementary school level (up
to class 8).
Chakraborty said: "The eight northeast states along
with most states of the country are not only against the 'no-detention
policy' but are also in an awkward position due to the lack of trained
teachers even though the Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009, made this
mandatory."
The minister said the Left Front government strongly
supported the plan for a new education policy, a process initiated by
the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government.