The approval by the Union Cabinet in July 2020 of India’s new National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) has filled me with hope for India’s youth. The NEP 2020 aims to create an education system that is more student-centric, giving flexibility to students to pursue their passion while at the same time enhancing their skills. If implemented properly, this policy will ultimately enable our youth to become more employable.
Since its launch, the new policy has been met with some criticism, despite it being hard to argue that the approach to education in India, which had been stagnant since 1986 (over 34 years!), needed a serious overhaul. However, I believe that this policy will open new doors for our youth. Not simply because it introduces an approach that is new, but because it introduces an approach that has already proven to be quite successful in other countries. I experienced it first-hand at Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) in Switzerland, the world leading hospitality management university, where their dual education approach (combining practical and theoretical learning) results in very high youth employment rates. A quick note to those who might hold the opinion that what works in other countries does/may not work in India – agreed, however we are not talking about verbatim application of a potential solution here; we must learn from others and contextualize for local application as long as the contextualization does not lead us to create nothing beyond a repackaging of what we have been applying for the last several decades and which clearly is not producing the desired outcomes.