No detention policy against students' interest: Parl panel

A parliamentary panel today favoured "reconsideration" of the policy of 'no detention' up to Class VIII, saying the policy in its present form works against the interest of children, especially those coming from disadvantaged sections.
The no detention policy introduced under the Right to Education Act automatically promotes students up to Class VIII. Critics have argued that the policy has led to poor learning outcome in classes.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD in its report tabled in Parliament echoes the same stand adopted by the previous panel during the UPA regime.
Demands for review of the policy have come from parents, teachers and students as well, some of whom sought re-introduction of class examinations during a recent meeting with HRD Minister Smriti Irani.

Criticising the government for scrapping the community college scheme, the standing committee "strongly" recommended giving distance education council, regulating such schemes, a statutory status as its functioning under UGC is not "legally tenable".
The panel said the scheme had barely been launched for two years and it was too short a time to take a final view on the programme's status and close down 532 community colleges.

It said the high-powered committee which examined the programme had no where recommended scrapping of the scheme but restructuring the programme by having an appropriate statutory mechanism along with certain other modifications.
"The only recommendations placed by the committee was that no new colleges should be admitted to the scheme till such restructuring. The committee reiterates its recommendations to give distance education council a statutory status to regulate distance learning.

"The present arrangement with UGC is neither practicable nor legally tenable. Therefore the distance education council of India bill should be brought before Parliament as soon as possible," the committee said in its report tabled in Parliament today.
To tackle the shortage of faculty in higher educational institutes such as IITs, NITs and IIMs, the committee recommended increasing the number of research fellowship and new programmes for teaching assistantship.
Concern was also raised by the committee about the declining allocation of funds to higher education sector and underutilisation of budget allocation, with the recommendation that funding should be raised to 25 per cent of all government education spending which is 1.5 per cent of the GDP.