The Hindu : File on advisory board gathering dust

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 20, 2002

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File on advisory board gathering dust

By Anita Joshua

NEW DELHI MARCH 19. The Union Human Resource Development Ministry apparently considers the Internet and television better for discussing the controversial `National Curriculum Framework for School Education' (NCFSE) than the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) — arguably the only advisory body of the Government in the field of education.

This is one of the reasons the Ministry is likely to cite for not putting the NCFSE through the CABE in its stand before the Supreme Court when the public interest petition filed by Aruna Roy, social activist, B. G. Verghese, columnist, and Meena Radhakrishna Tyabji, sociologist — challenging the new curriculum — comes up for hearing on Friday.

Granting an interim stay on the petition, a three-judge Bench had on March 1 said: "There shall be a direction to the HRD Ministry, the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Educational Research and Training not to further implement the new curriculum without consultation with the CABE."

As far as the Ministry is concerned, the CABE is not a statutory body and can, therefore, be bypassed. Maintaining that the new curriculum had been widely discussed, the Ministry is of the view that the CABE had been more or less rendered redundant with the emergence of new fora for discussions such as the Internet and the electronic media. Another argument of the Ministry against the CABE is that it is a British-day institution as it was originally constituted in 1920.

Still, an attempt had been made by the HRD Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, in December 1999 to reconstitute the CABE. Though he approved the constitution of a `trimmed' CABE in December 1999 after the then Prime Minister returned a proposal to reconstitute it on January 1997 on the ground that it was too unwieldy, no action has since been taken.

As against the 109 members in the last CABE — the extended term of which ended in March 1994 — Dr. Joshi had given the nod for one that would have only 60 members. The new CABE would have as its members besides Dr. Joshi, the Minister of State, Member (Education) in Planning Commission, 10 State Education Ministers (to be rotated annually), the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD, two members from the Lok Sabha and one from the Rajya Sabha, 27 ex-officio members (heads of various institutions under the Ministry, the Principal Adviser to the Planning Commission, and the Secretaries of various Ministries and departments), ten eminent educationists and experts (all nominated) and five representatives of NGOs and voluntary agencies. For the past two years, the file is gathering dust despite demands for reconstituting the CABE.

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