INAUGURAL SESSION
Welcome Address Shri G. K. Chandiramani, Education Secretary, welcomed the Members of the Board. He said:
On behalf of the Ministry of Education and myself, it is my proud privilege and pleasure to welcome all of you assembled here at this inaugural session of the 34th meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education. I extend a special welcome to the new members who are taking their seat on the Board for the first time this year. I also extend a cordial welcome to our guest, Dr. D. R. Gadgil, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, who has kindly agreed, in the midst of his multifarious duties, to be with us this morning and also to address the session.
You are all aware that the Planning Commission decided, some time ago, to treat the years 1966-67, 1967-68 and 1968-69 as annual Plan years and to begin the Fourth Five Year Plan from 1969-70. The preparations for this began early this year and are now nearing completion. The Planning Commission and the Ministry of Education will be discussing their plans with the State Governments between the 15th of October and 20th of November. This meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education has been arranged in order that its advice is available before the discussions with the individual States start as they have been scheduled, from the 15th of October.
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I would like to express our apology on one score. We completed the first set of agenda papers and sent them to all members on 26th September; and the second set, which we thought would be the last, was also sent on 30th September. Unfortunately, owing to difficulties in the postal department, several members received these papers late and some did not receive them at all. For the same reason, some items to be included on the agenda which were sent to us by the members as early as about 15th September, reached us as late as on 5th October! There was no time to circulate them to the members in advance and we have laid copies of these papers on the table. We regret very much the inconvenience caused on account of these difficulties.
Sir, I will now briefly refer to the agenda before this meeting. It includes a number of items suggested by the Ministry of Education, State Governments, and individual members. On a closer analysis, however, these can conveniently be divided into three main categories:
(1) The first includes proposals which raise some general issues of educational policy;
(2) The second includes items which relate to the Fourth Five Year Plan-its formulation and implementation; and
(3) The third includes proposals bearing on the recommendations made by the National Integration Council in its meeting held at Srinagar in June, 1968.
It is, therefore, proposed that the Board should divide itself into three special committees, one for each of these categories of proposals. I hope you approve of this arrangement.
May I also place before you the tentative programme which has been drawn up by the Chairman for this meeting? This inaugural session will last for about an hour during which we shall have the pleasure of listening to the addresses of the Union Education Minister and the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. I am quite sure that these addresses will give a valuable lead for all our deliberations. We shall then hold a general discussion on the different items included in the Agenda and this may take probably the whole of today. The three special committees will meet tomorrow morning and propose draft resolutions for the consideration of the Board. At the afternoon session tomorrow, the resolutions proposed by the committees will be considered by the Board. I hope that this meets, with your approval.
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Sir, before I close, I would like to invite the attention of the Members of the Board to the significance which attaches to our deliberations at this meeting. The main subject of our discussion is the formulation of the Fourth Five Year Plan in Education. We have now had experience of planning for 18 years three five year Plans and three annual Plan years. During this period, our emphasis was, and I believe rightly, on expanding educational facilities at all stages. Consequently, programmes of quality received comparatively less attention. We have now come to a stage when there must be a shift in our emphasis. There will still be expansion to meet the social demand and it may even have to be accelerated at the primary stage. But it is essential that we now begin to lay greater emphasis on programmes of consolidation and qualitative improvement. We must review our experience in educational planning and implementation and strive to improve the planning process and to make the implementation more vigorous and effective. We now have with us the recommendations of the Education Commission and the Government Resolution on the National Policy on Education. We must do all we can to implement this policy. We will also have to include in our plans, adequate measures to give, effect to the recommendations of the National Integration Council. All this implies that the Fourth Five Year Plan will have to be qualitatively different from the earlier Plans and not merely large in size. This is the challenge which we will have to face at this meeting.
Sir, if we can take some bold decisions and break new ground in our policies for planning and implementation and if the Planning Commission were to place adequate resources at our disposal, I have no doubt that the new Fourth Five Year Plan which will begin next year will enable us to turn a new page in our educational history. It is to this end that we should all direct our energies.
Sir, may I now, on behalf of all assembled here and myself, request you to deliver the Inaugural Address to this 34th Meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education?
Inaugural Address Dr. Triguna Sen, Union Education Minister, then delivered the inaugural address. He said:
I join my friend and colleague, Shri G. K. Chandiramani, in extending a warm welcome to all of you to this 34th Meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education.
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Review of the Main Educational Developments in the Last Year When we met about a year ago in August last, we had placed three main tasks before ourselves. The first was to consider the Report of the Education Commission and to formulate a National Policy on Education. The second was to prepare a fairly long-term plan of educational development in the country based on the national educational policy; and the third was to start a vigorous implementation of the programme of educational reconstruction thus decided upon by revising the old Fourth Plan which was then in its third year.
With regard to the first of these tasks, it may be recalled that you considered the recommendations of the Education Commission, the tenth Conference of State Education Ministers and the Committee of Members of Parliament on Education (1967) and recommended that the Government of India should issue a Resolution on the National Policy on Education on the broad lines of your recommendations. The Ministry of Education then discussed these proposals further, in the Vice- Chancellors' Conference held in September, 1967 and in both Houses of Parliament. After all this nation-wide debate was over and after taking into consideration all the different viewpoints put before it the Government of India has finally issued a Resolution on the National Policy on Education, copies of which have already been circulated to you. I believe that this is an essential step well taken and that it will provide us with a broad compass to guide our efforts at educational reconstruction.
The second task which we had set before ourselves was to prepare a fairly long-term plan of educational development in the country spread over, say, the next 15-20 years. Since the centre of gravity in educational planning is now being deliberately shifted to the State level, this effort has obviously to be done separately for each State and Union Territory and then consolidated suitably for the country as a whole.
I took up this matter with all State Governments and I am happy to report that the response has been very good. Of special interest is the lead given by Maharashtra under its able and enthusiastic Education Minister, Shri M D. Choudhury. He has brought out an excellent review of recent educational developments in his State. He has also formulated a tentative plan of long-term development and has published its broad principles, in the form of a White Paper, for eliciting public opinion. This has received very wide attention and has been discussed on hundreds of platforms in the State. It is also proposed to be discussed in the State Legislature. After taking all the suggestions into consideration, the State Government proposes to issue
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a statement of its educational policy and a long-term plan of edu- cational development based thereon. The Fourth Five Year Plan of the State will be the first major step in implementing these proposals. Similar steps have also been initiated in a number of States; and although it has not been possible to make substantial progress due to several reasons I need not discuss here, we hope to make better progress in the days ahead, and, with the cooperation of the States which is so generously coming forth, to complete this task before the end of the next year.
I am sorry we could not make any progress with regard to the third task, namely, to revise the old Fourth Five Year Plan in the light of the recommendations of the Education Commission and to start implementing them, to the extent possible, from 1968-69 itself. This was due almost entirely to two factors beyond our control. The financial situation, both at the Centre and in the States, was so difficult that the utmost we could do was to keep the old schemes going; and even as we were grappling with this problem, the Planning Commission decided to scrap the old Fourth Five Year Plan itself and to direct that a new Fourth Five Year Plan should be prepared from 1969-70. All major programmes of educational development, therefore, had to be postponed to the next year.
Fourth Five Year Plan I shall now turn to the most important item on our agenda, namely, the formulation of the Fourth Five Year Plan in Education. The basic document you have to consider in this regard is the Report of the Steering Committee of the Central Planning Group which proposes an outlay of Rs. 1,300 crore in the public sector. This is only slightly more than the allocation made to education in the old Fourth Plan, namely, Rs. 1,210 crore. In the new Fourth Plan, however, we shall need a much larger allocation of about Rs. 1,500-1,600 crore because we have to work on a larger base, develop a more comprehensive programme and allow for a substantial increase in prices that has since taken place. Unfortunately, it appears that we may not be able to get this allocation at all and that the actual allocation to educa- tion may be as low as Rs. 900-1,000 crore. This seems to be due to three main reasons. The first is that the total amount available for planned development is likely to be much smaller, mainly because the hard political decisions required to raise the necessary resources do not seem to be forthcoming. Secondly, higher priorities are being given to programmes of agricultural development, irrigation, power, industry and family planning; and thirdly, every sector in education- Central, Centrally-sponsored and the State-seems to be contracting, for some reason or the other. Such a low allocation can only be disastrous
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to the future, of education, especially because it has been estimaed that the minimum amount needed for the inevitable expansion alone will be about Rs. 1,100 crore. Unless, therefore, we take proper steps, right from now, it may not be possible to implement the National Policy on Education in a satisfactory manner.
In my opinion, therefore, we must do all we can to maximise the total investment in educational development. The Government of India will have to expand its Central sector. The State Governments, in their turn, will have to give a high priority to education and make as large allocations to it as possible. These should, under no circumstances, be less than about 10 per cent of the State Plans. In addition, efforts should also be made to raise the maximum contribution possible from other sources such as local authorities, voluntary organisations and local communities.
While I do plead for higher allocations, I must also emphasise another aspect of the problems, namely, the urgent necessity to reduce wastages and to economise costs. In education, we must learn to place a much greater emphasis on the returns we obtain rather than on the investments we make. Poor as we are, and small as is the investment we now make in educational development, we all know that there is a good deal of wasteful and ill-effective expenditure even in the present system. Our rates of wastage and stagnation are high at all stages, and especially at the primary stage. The unit cost per student is often high because the institution is of an uneconomic size or is wrongly located, or because no attempt has been made to try out alternative techniques of development and choose the one which would be most economic and effective. Even rich countries will not be able to afford such wasteful expenditure; and it has obviously no place whatsoever in a poor country like India. It would therefore be a great thing if we can emphasise these aspects of the problem in the Fourth Five Year Plan and concentrate our efforts on reducing the ineffectiveness and waste which is writ large on every sector of our educational system.
Side by side, we must emphasise yet another aspect of educational development which has been comparatively neglected in the past, namely, the need to stress human effort rather than. monetary investment. The programmes I have in view in this context include: revision of curricula; adoption of improved methods of teaching and evaluation; improvement of textbooks; production of instructional materials of high quality; improvement of supervision; and bringing the school closer to the community through programmes of mutual service and support. Even these programmes will need some investment in financial
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and physical terms, no doubt. But this is comparatively limited and what they need most is hard original thinking and sustained and dedicated effort. How to provide these essential inputs and to emphasise these programmes is one of the major problems to be faced in the Fourth Plan.
I feel that the key to the success in this programme is the teacher. In the first three Five Year Plans, teachers were not effectively involved in formulating and implementing educational plans. We must now make earnest efforts to do so. Side by side, we must take steps to improve their professional preparation, status and remuneration. I would like to draw the attention of all concerned to the fact that the problem of improving the salaries of school teachers has not yet been satisfactorily solved and that determined effort will have to be made for this purpose in the Fourth Five Year Plan. To the same end, we will have to adopt a broad-based and decentralised system of educational planning under which well-coordinated plans would be prepared at the institutional, district, State and national levels, strengthen institutions like the NCERT and the State institutes of education which are charged with the responsibility of academic improvement of education, involve selected university departments in improved programmes of school education and generally strengthen educational administration.
I shall refer only to one more point about the Fourth Five Year Plan, namely, the need to select some national programmes for intensive implementation. A national programme has been defined, in the Government Resolution on the National Policy on Education, as a programme of national importance in which coordinated action on the part of the Government of India and the State Governments is called for. Obviously, the national programmes to be implemented will vary from time to time; and it will be a responsibility of the Centre and the States to sit together and decide the national programmes to be implemented in each Five Year Plan. At this meeting, therefore, we shall have to attempt this exercise for the Fourth Five Year Plan; and as a basis for consideration, may I suggest that we might develop the following six, national programmes over the next five years?
(1) Steps for the early fulfilment of the directive of Arti- cle 45 of the Constitution, With special emphasis on programmes for reducing wastage and stagnation;
(2) Qualitative improvement of higher education;
(3) Orientation of technical education at all stages to the needs of the economy;
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(4) Science education;
(5) Book development programmes; and
(6) Schemes for promoting national integration including the National Service Programme.
I would be very grateful to have suggestions of the Board on this and other matters related to the formulation of the Fourth Five Year Plan.
National Integration The third important item on your Agenda relates to the programmes of national integration. As you are aware, the National Integration Council has made a number of important recommendations at its Srinagar meeting held in June 1968. We have to consider how these could be implemented expeditiously.
An important recommendation of the Council is that the entire educational system, from primary to post-graduate stage, should be reoriented to serve the purpose of creating a sense of Indianness, unity and solidarity, to inculcate faith in the basic postulates of Indian democracy and to help the nation to create a modern society. This will need an overhaul of curricula, textbooks and instructional materials at all stages. I attach very great importance to this recommendation and generally to the improvement of school textbooks and instructional materials. I would, therefore, urge strongly on every State Government to set up appropriate agencies, on the lines recommended by the Education Commission, for the improvement of textbooks and instructional materials. We also propose to set up with the concurrence of the State Governments, a National Board of School Textbooks, a proposal for which has been included in your Agenda.
Another important recommendation of the Council is that the common school system, as recommended by the Education Commission, should be adopted as early as possible. This will need, as pointed out in the Government Resolution on the National Policy on Education, a two-fold programme of action. On the one hand, the standard of education in the general schools will have to be improved, giving special attention to rural and other backward areas, and a deliberate attempt will have to be made to set up good schools in under- privileged areas. On the other hand, the segregation that now takes place in the special schools which charge high fees, will have to be. eliminated by requiring these schools to admit a certain proportion of students, selected on the basis of merit, as free scholars. There can also be other alternative approaches to the creation of a common school system which is our accepted goal. I would, therefore,