As a part of the celebrations for the upcoming Amrit Mahotsav on 75 years of Independence, Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ launched SARTHAQ, the implementation plan for school education under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, on 8 April 2021.
The launch made the document the operating manual for the school half of the National Education Policy 2020. SARTHAQ, Ramesh Pokhriyal told the meeting, had been readied “well within one year” of the policy’s notification on 29 July 2020, according to the Press Information Bureau. The name is an acronym of the plan’s full title, which describes the advancement of students and teachers through quality education.
Pokhriyal announced the implementation in the presence of higher education secretary Amit Khare, School Education secretary Anita Karwal and senior officials of the ministry.
The minister told the gathering that the plan of action had been rolled out under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, the Press Information Bureau release records, and placed the launch inside the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav calendar of events.
Inside National Education Policy 2020 SARTHAQ: Ramesh Pokhriyal’s 297-task plan
The plan links the recommendations of the policy to 297 specific tasks, each with a responsible agency and a timeline, and maps them to 304 outputs, the Ministry of Education said in its release. It covers the next ten years, is to be rolled out in phases, and deliberately builds on existing structures rather than creating new ones. The ministry calls it an indicative and suggestive document, one that will keep evolving as states and stakeholders send feedback.
The outcomes the department lists read as a ten-year order book for school education: new national curriculum frameworks, foundational literacy and numeracy by Grade 3, teaching in the mother tongue in the early years, reform of teacher education, and an online public disclosure system that will put school performance data in the open. Higher enrolment and retention figure in the same list. The department frames each outcome as the product of named tasks with named agencies, which is what separates the plan from the policy it serves.
Enunciating SARTHAQ, the ministry said that it keeps in mind the concurrent nature of education and adheres to the spirit of federalism. “SARTHAQ will pave the way for children to meet the diverse national and global challenges of the present and the future. It will help them to imbibe 21st-century skills along with India’s tradition, culture and value system as envisioned in National Education Policy 2020. SARTHAQ would benefit all stakeholders including 25 crore students, 15 lakh schools, 94 lakh teachers,” the minister said.
How the plan was put together
SARTHAQ which has been developed with the help and consultation with states and Union Territories, Autonomous bodies and suggestions received from stakeholders provides a roadmap for the implementation of NEP 2020 for the next 10 years. An official statement informed that around 7177 suggestions/inputs were received.
A teacher’s fest, ‘ShikshakParv’ was organized from 8th to 25th September 2020 for discussing various recommendations of NEP 2020 and its implementation strategies, which attracted around 15 lakh suggestions.
The Department of School Education and Literacy, which drafted the document, has published it in two parts on its website, the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability noted in its summary of the plan. The numbers behind the exercise, set out in the ministry’s release, run as follows:
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Tasks in the plan | 297, each with an agency and timeline |
| Outputs mapped | 304 |
| Horizon | 10 years, in phases |
| Suggestions from states and bodies | Around 7,177 |
| Suggestions at ShikshakParv | Around 15 lakh |
| Students covered | 25 crore |
| Schools covered | 15 lakh |
| Teachers covered | 94 lakh |
What it asks of the states
Education sits on the concurrent list, and the ministry has been careful to frame the National Education Policy 2020 SARTHAQ, Ramesh Pokhriyal’s officials stressed, as a menu rather than a mandate. States and Union Territories remain free to adapt the plan to their own conditions, and the document is to be read alongside each state’s own rules, budgets and cadres.
The ministry’s release returns to the point more than once: the plan keeps the concurrent nature of education in mind, adheres to federalism, and overrides nothing in a state’s own sequencing. For state boards, textbook corporations and teacher training institutes, the practical consequence is that the 297 tasks arrive as a reference list against which each state writes its own order of work.
Calling the policy interactive, flexible and inclusive, Pokhriyal said that the States and Union Territories are allowed to modify the plans or implement the plan with “local contextualisation”.
The minister urged all the stakeholders to use the SARTHAQ plan as a “guiding star” to do “transformational reforms in the school education sector.”
What has happened since
The consultation did not stop at the launch. The ministry has said the text will be updated as feedback comes in from states and Union Territories, and the department has treated the April 2021 edition as a baseline rather than a finished product. That matters to anyone planning against it, because the task list, not the policy prose, is where budgets and tenders will eventually be anchored.
The first of the plan’s outcomes moved quickly. On 5 July 2021 the ministry launched NIPUN Bharat, the national mission for foundational literacy and numeracy that aims to have every child reading, writing and doing basic arithmetic by the end of Grade 3 by 2026-27, Careers360 reported. The mission gives states the same role the plan does: implementation sits with them, while the centre sets the targets and the tools.
The document itself remains live on the Department of School Education and Literacy’s site, where both parts can be downloaded. The target that NIPUN Bharat now carries was written into the outcome tables of the National Education Policy 2020 SARTHAQ, Ramesh Pokhriyal’s department published in April, well before the mission had a name of its own.
