NEW DELHI: The new National Education Policy (NEP) has been unanimously given a thumbs-down by the 22 executive members of Delhi University Teachers’ Association. The teachers discussed some inputs for the Draft National Education Policy 2016” in a series of meetings and even the four members, who are generally regarded as “pro-BJP”, did not defend it. In fact, teachers are calling it the “National Exclusion Policy.”“We have long-standing positions on issues of commercialisation, massively open online courses (MOOCs), internationalisation and recruitment policies. They can’t really go against all that now,” said DUTA president Nandita Narain. In addition to demanding that “this document be immediately withdrawn and a wide and transparent debate be initiated with the involvement of all sections of Indians”, the association is also setting up a sub-committee to prepare a detailed report on the document.DUTA has joined the organisations questioning the origins of the inputs as the document itself offers no clues to its provenance. It doesn’t even mention the Subramanian Committee established to formulate the draft.Their statement said, “What is most shocking is that this document, that appeared without acknowledgment of authorship, appears to have been lifted wholesale from the “Final Vision NEP Policy Document International Seminar on National Education Policy and NAMODI Framework” held on 11-14 July, 2016.”The teachers argued that the inputs “reflects a narrow agenda of privatisation.” The statement said, “The policy document points towards more commercialisation and cost-cutting by advocating mergers of existing government schools and promotion of MOOCs as a cheap alternative to the urgent requirement of increasing the number of public-funded institutions at all levels of education. It also recommends student loans, thereby putting an injurious debt-burden on students that is bound to have disastrous consequences on their academic choices and creativity.”The statement added that the inputs fails to account for deteriorating standards of education at the school and higher levels due to lack of adequate teachers and learning infrastructure. And teachers are against the proposal to make transfers easier, arguing that it is “bound to have adverse repercussions on the stability and growth of institutions and confidence of the teaching community.”It also said that the inputs “maintains a dishonest silence on continuously declining service conditions for teachers, ad-hocism in recruitment, effective lack of promotional avenues and erosion of the autonomy of universities in matters of syllabi and examinations.” They described the “narrow emphasis” on skill-based education as “blinkered.”The policy, they said, “needs to articulate the widest-possible role of education in relation to the social, economic and cultural empowerment of citizens. The document reduces education to a mere feeder-process that aims to provide cheap labour to the global job market.” Issues of the backward groups and the disabled, they feel, have been “ignored.”Finally, the DUTA criticised what it sees as the “uncritical and monolithic articulation of “Indian culture” which exposes a Vedic and Brahminical bias and ignores the plurality of knowledge-traditions in the subcontinent.”