Gender in the New Education Policy 2016 in the Making

Abstract

There is no doubt that until now significant progress has been made to include gender in the Indian education policy. Further, it is also recognized that investment in the education of both boys and girls with focus on equity is consistently the most powerful and important indicator of national development, as well as being a vehicle for the advancement of the present and future generations of children. Therefore, leaving out issues of gender and girls’ education puts a question mark on the future vision of society. Right now, the new education policy is in the making, after a gap of 24 years. There are two documents in the public domain. The first one was an outcome of a very extensive and expansive process of consultations. This article interrogates the process of policy formulation by looking at texts of these two reports as primary data sources. The central concern in this article is to show the complete or near complete gender blindness or exclusion of concerns regarding education of girls and women in the two documents. As a result, there is no or hardly any space given to them in these documents which presumably will go into the formulation of the new education policy. What is required is a focus on equality and a transformative conception of gender inclusiveness in the new policy, which will ensure meaningful and realistic inclusion of gender concerns.