Govt finalising new national education policy: HRD Ministry

The government is in the process of finalising the new national education policy which will focus on making India's education system learner-centric instead of teacher-centric, said a top official of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) on Thursday.

While addressing the FICCI Higher Education Summit 2017 here, Dr. N. Saravana Kumar, Joint Secretary, MHRD, said, "The government is in the process of finalising the new national education policy which will focus on making India's education system learner-centric instead of teacher-centric. Also, the highly regulated education sector is being liberalized and private sector participation is being encouraged for India to acquire global citizenship in education."

Sixty-seven countries are participating in three-day FICCI Higher Education Summit 2017. One thousand delegates, of which more than 247 are foreign delegates predominantly from Africa, SAARC, Middle East, CIS, Finland, New Zealand, Malaysia, Australia, USA, etc. are participating at the summit.

In line with the government's focus to reform the Indian education system to cater to the needs of the future, the theme for the summit is 'Leapfrogging to Education 4.0: Student at the Core'.

Speaking on the occasion, Sudhanshu Pandey, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, said, "In the wake of protectionism, knowledge sharing and student exchange programmes become critical and gives a new hope for tomorrow. Around five million students move around the globe for education. India is among one of the nations with high outflow of students, the country spends more than $20 billion on students studying abroad and there is a need to make India the centre of education."

He further added that Pandey said that the student has been at the core of education and shall remain at its epicenter in future as well.

In his video message, Prakash Javadekar, Union Minister for HRD, said that the government had come out with learning outcomes and was providing greater autonomy to the institutes to pursue research and development and innovation.

Suresh Prabhu, Union Minister for Commerce & Industry, in his message, urged the stakeholders including industry and academic to recommend ideas to promote the business of education globally.

Nina Vaskunlahti, Ambassador of Finland to India; Prof (Dr) Rajan Saxena, Chair-FICCI Higher Education Committee; Prof Vinod Bhat, Co chair, FICCI Higher Education Summit; Dr Sanjaya Baru, Secretary General, FICCI; Shobha M. Ghosh, Assistant Secretary General, FICCI; and Sangeeta Godbole, Director General, Services Export Promotion Council (SEPC) also spoke on the occasion, where FICCI-EY report 'Leapfrogging to Education 4.0: Student at the Core' and FICCI Report on Social Outreach in Higher Education were also released.