– The NotA Collective

The new National Education Policy (NEP), despite receiving no deliberation in either house of the Indian Parliament, was adopted by the Cabinet on 29 July, 2020. While substantive criticisms have been made of this document and its predecessors,¹ less attention has been devoted to the impact of vocational education on the higher education landscape. We will argue in this essay that the entrenchment and mainstreaming of vocational education it mandates reinforces the already-existing social hierarchies. It does this by placing further obstacles in the way of working class/lower caste students who want to pursue general education. This in turn contributes to the reproduction of the problem of their underrepresentation in academia. It is therefore imperative we, as members of academia, mount a coordinated resistance to it.

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