Imagine, you are working on developing a model in Python and get stuck somewhere. Your sister, who is 7 years younger to you, pops behind your screen, types a few lines of code in a millisecond, laughs at your careless mistakes, and vanishes! If I had said this a few days ago, you would have laughed off my face. But with the new education policy in place, there is a really good chance that all of this turns into reality.

We have been criticizing our education system for years for its outdated syllabus, theoretical approach, lack of vocational skills, inability to cure unemployment, the anxiety, and depression that it generates in young minds and whatnot. But on 29th June 2020, the Indian government finally said, “No, that’s enough!” and the National Education Policy 2020 was introduced.

Not only was the Ministry of Human Resource and Development renamed as the Ministry of Education, but the New Education Policy as a whole also took a 360-degree turn from the traditional Indian approach. The 10+2 school structure was changed to a 5+3+3+4 structure of schooling. Instead of choosing between Science, Commerce, and Arts, the students will now be given a choice to pick out the subjects that they want to study. The schools have been advised to teach all the subjects in their home language and an effort is being made to produce bilingual textbooks. Mathematics and Computational thinking will be given emphasis during the middle stage. Although the 10th and 12th exams will still be organized by the Board, efforts are being made to reduce the need to undertake coaching classes to succeed in these exams. Students will be required to appear for a common entrance test, happening twice a year, to secure admissions in colleges/universities. A four-year Bachelor’s degree will be introduced with the flexibility to drop out and return as per a student’s requirement. Eminent Universities around the globe will be persuaded to open a branch in India and similarly, Indian institutes will be propelled to go global. 

In a country where undergraduate students even find it difficult to earn a good internship, school students will be given vocational training to make them independent at a young age. Similarly, this policy seems to solve the countless problems that we have been facing with our education system. But the question remains, are we able enough to improvise this policy as efficiently as we have been writing in words, or are we yet again building fake beautiful castles in the air?