India's first Minister of Education Ramesh Pokhriyal resigned on July 7, 2021, before the cabinet reshuffle on Tuesday evening. Having spent a little over two years in office, this former Uttarakhand Chief Minister had a lot of milestones achieved during his tenure and the education spectrum. Here, we take a look at a few of them.
Implementation of the new NEP
India's new National Educational Policy was implemented on July 29, 2020. A draft of the same was handed over to Pokhriyal in 2019, on the day he took charge as the Minister of Human Resource Development. Renaming of MHRD as MoE was suggested in the NEP, which was drafted by a committee headed by the former ISRO chief Dr K Kasturirangan. It had suggested replacing the 10+2 system with the 5+3+3+4 model, worked on reducing the school bag weight, and proposed to start the National Research Foundation.
Global ranking
Indian universities have improved their positions in the QS world ranking during his term.
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Expanding IoE status
In 2020 and 2021, during Pokhriyal's term, the Institute of Eminence status was expanded to private universities too. In January 2021 the Government of India issued further guidelines, allowing IoEs to open offshore campuses.
Online degree
After getting the NEP approved, Indian universities had introduced full-fledged online degree courses. The first of the loT, a BSc Data Science programme in IIT Madras was inaugurated by Pokhriyal.
Syllabus reduction
For the first time in its history, the CBSE had announced a reduction of the syllabus for its 2021 Class XII exams, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was announced by Pokhriyal
