Beyond Jantar Mantar: The Dharmendra Pradhan report card

Dharmendra Pradhan’s exit as Education Minister was under a cloud, but his five-year tenure was marked by stepped-up efforts to implement the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which the Union Cabinet adopted a year before he took over. Earlier, in the Ministry of Petroleum, he had made his mark in the implementation of the program by providing eight crore LPG connections to poor households in three years towards the four-year target.

From the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), flexible learning and multidisciplinarity and the Vikshit Bharat Shiksha Abhiyan (VBSA), which replaced the UGC in higher education, to the PM SHRI, trilingual formula and new teacher training initiatives in school education, his Ministry was constantly in the news for introducing “reforms”. Common threads ran through them: performance evaluation and accountability, skills-training convergence, promotion of a particular vision of Indianness, ambition subverted by implementation difficulties, and the drive for uniformity, which critics called centralization and disregard for diversity. Almost all of the work that the new Minister of Education will have to advance is ongoing.

Through Nipun Bharat, officially launched by Mr. Pradhan’s predecessor on the heels of pandemic-era learning losses, the government was finally acting on evidence from decades of surveys by voluntary organizations that schoolchildren in India were falling far behind in reading and math despite officially graduating every year. It aims to ensure that every child achieves basic literacy and numeracy skills by the end of Grade 3 by 2026-27. ASER 2024 showed a seven percentage point increase in numeracy since 2018, and PARAKH 2024 found that Grade 3 students benefiting from the first three years of the mission outperformed Grades 6 and 9 in languages ​​and mathematics. But less than a quarter of students nationwide could read Grade 2 texts, and Grade 5 levels remained roughly at pre-pandemic levels; This is a sign of implementation gaps that may necessitate Nipun Bharat 2.0.

National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPST) is India’s first initiative to evaluate and classify teachers – proficient, expert or advanced – against uniform national standards, with career progression tied to this ladder. The National Mentoring Mission (NMM), which aims to identify mentor teachers to guide others upwards on this ladder through nominations and volunteering, is being rolled out through online sessions, but awareness among the country’s one-crore teachers remains low and impact evaluations are yet to be formalised. The fact that NPST has not yet been implemented leaves teachers with little incentive to participate in mentoring sessions.

Some initiatives have sparked sharper debate. The 2025 draft UGC regulations on appointment of teachers, vice-chancellors and staff have faced strong opposition, especially for giving Governors a decisive say in vice-chancellor appointments and removing the cap on contractual professorships. Separately, the UGC’s new undergraduate and postgraduate degree rules, built around flexibility and multidisciplinarity to create a skilled workforce, have been officially in place since the 2025 academic year – but institutions in the States are still barely grasping radical concepts such as a commerce student studying science or transferring credits between universities through the National Credit Framework.

One example of education-skills convergence is the Swayam Plus platform, which offers over 500 industry-developed courses across 15 sectors, including emerging technologies. R. Sarathi, Dean (Planning), Dean and Coordinator, Swayam Plus IIT Madras, says around 6.5 lakh students are enrolled and the “AI for All” initiative, which includes courses like Artificial Intelligence for Physics, Artificial Intelligence for Chemistry, Artificial Intelligence in Accounting, Artificial Intelligence for Educators and Artificial Intelligence/Learning using Python, has attracted one lakh participants. Prof. Sarathi is receiving encouraging response from educational institutions accepting the industry credits these courses bring.

Mr Pradhan also pushed to accelerate the adoption of the NEP – especially the three-language policy – by linking central funding for primary education programs to compliance. Tamil Nadu continues to resist, despite West Bengal’s new government acknowledging this. In CBSE schools, Mr. Pradhan directly made learning two Bharatiya languages ​​mandatory from Class 6 to Class 12, prioritizing Indian languages ​​over English. Some relief was provided to existing students, but the government remained firm on this as the norm going forward, even though the NEP, while advocating Indian languages, also emphasized the learning of English and other foreign languages.