Head of NEP drafting committee K Kasturirangan to head steering committee on national curriculum development – Times of India

NEW DELHI: The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) drafting committee chairperson K Kasturirangan will head the national steering committee for the development of the new curriculum for school, early childhood, teacher and adult education. The ministry of education (MoE) on Tuesday formed a 12-member committee with the mandate to develop four National Curriculum Frameworks (NFFs). The committee also included Najma Akhtar, VC of Jamia Millia Islamia, the first woman to hold the post.

As per the terms of reference of the committee, it will develop four NCFs for school education, early childhood care and education, teacher education and adult education, keeping in focus all the recommendations of NEP 2020 related to these four areas for proposing curriculum reforms.

The NCFs serves as a guideline for syllabus, textbooks and teaching practices for the schools in India. The committee will discuss the position papers finalised by the National Focus Groups on different aspects of the four areas drawing inputs from State Curriculum Frameworks received on the tech platform for the NCFs.

While developing the NCFs the committee would also reflect upon the implications of situations such as COVID-19.

According to senior MoE officials, the new NCF is likely to be finalised before 2022 and the curriculums are to be rolled out in phase manner from the new academic session. This will be the fifth national curriculum framework, which will come after a gap of 16 years.

The TOI has on June 26, 2021 reported that the development of the new curriculums will not be a top down exercise and district-level consultations will be held after states/ UTs come up with their own curriculum before the NCFs are put in place. The position papers in identified areas/ themes as per the NEP 2020 will be the basis for State Curriculum Frameworks (SCFs), based on which the NCFs are to be developed. All the position papers will have two sections. The first section will be common for all Focus Group Papers and the second section will include specific features of the position paper.

The committee will finalise NCFs after incorporating suggestions received from various stakeholders, i.e., states/ UTs and also in the meetings of the Executive Committee (EC) and General Body (GB) of the NCERT and Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE).

Former head of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Kasturirangan will have the company of Mahesh Chandra Pant, chancellor of National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, Govind Prasad Sharma, chairperson of the National Book Trust, T V Kattimani, VC of Central Tribal University of Andhra Pradesh, Michel Danino, guest professor at IIT Gandhinagar, Milind Kamble, chairperson of IIM, Jammu, Jagbir Singh, chancellor of Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, Manjul Bhargava, American mathematician of Indian origin, M K Sridhar, trainer and a social activist and served a member of a committee for draft, Dhir Jhingran, founder director of Language and Learning Foundation (LLF) and Shankar Maruwada, co-founder and CEO at EkStep Foundation and an entrepreneur. The tenure of the committee is for three years.