Is State education sector lacking transformational leadership?

Hyderabad: Is the delay in the State government's decision on implementing the New Education Policy-2020 (NEP-2020) and the lack of transformational leadership among the policy-making state bureaucracy taking a toll on students, making them lose time to acquire competitive and relevant skills?

The widespread feeling among the academicians in the state universities and higher education is a lack of freedom and "the excessive dominance and interference of bureaucracy and lack of timely response from the political leadership hitting hard the education sector for the past 10 years."

Unlike ever before, even in the United Andhra Pradesh, babus are seen frequently on the stages purely related to academic activity and capacity building, new courses and the like advising to think out-of-the-box to be competitive and impart employable skills. However, when it is time for walking the talk, they are showing their backs.

Speaking to The Hans India, a former top official from Telangana Higher Education sector who visited several foreign countries to explore potential collaborations expressed his anguish that not a single proposal was accepted by the State government. When asked why he failed during his own tenure to initiate optimum utilisation of existing resources and infrastructure to introduce new courses, he said, "It requires the nod from the bureaucracy, which is heavily dependent on the state government for finances."

All this boils down to undesirable consequences leaving parents and students with fewer options to pursue different fields useful both for career and academics.

Take for example, the NEP-2020, which allows the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to introduce agriculture from secondary schooling to 10+2. When asked, why the same is not a focussed area for students of intermediate education, a member of the syllabus committee of Telangana Board of Intermediate Education (TGBIE) said, "There are several government and private agriculture polytechnics in the state for students who want to pursue agriculture and agriculture engineering after SSC," he added.

However, students studying arts can take science and vice-versa from Class X in the case of CBSE and ICSE. In turn, a science student studying chemistry and biology can take a legal studies paper, which neither the School Education Department nor the TGBIE could not offer as it still could not adopt NEP-2020 and follows the conventional modes of courses at the intermediate level that prevents students from taking the courses of their choice. This leaves a student of TGBIE intermediate to join in the same and allied streams at the undergraduate level B.Sc Chemistry, Biology, Agriculture and the like. On the other, for example, a CBSE student is at ease to pursue multi-disciplinary areas like xenobiotics and risk mitigation, an undergraduate and post-graduation that integrates legislation, toxicology or pharmacology, biotechnology and risk mitigation to become risk assessment analysts of chemical and biotechnology production and products.

Teaching to introduce new courses is possible by the state universities since toxicology, pharmacology, biotechnology, agriculture and legal studies are already taught at the undergraduate level. A former State University V-C clarified, "It needs introducing credit transfers among the Osmania and other state universities with state health and agriculture universities. The UGC allows one or two universities to jointly offer courses. But, who will bell the cat remain unanswered."