Education an election plank: Sisodia

During a session titled, “Shiksha: Experiments with Education”, on the opening day of Times Litfest 2019, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said the country had been waiting for 70 years for a government to put its hands up and say that its focus was education. He said his message had always been that “we have to vote on education”.

Sisodia recalled his younger days when his father taught in a government school in a village and was even engaged in collecting census data, as ordered by the administration from Lucknow. That, he said, made him wonder when the teachers got time to teach. “At that time, I didn’t know that I would end up being an education minister. My book — Shiksha: My Experiments as an Education Minister — should not be seen as the views of an educationist. There could be flaws and I may not have presented many solutions. But these are the views of a public representative — it’s about the pain of the public,” he said.

He said the forthcoming Delhi assembly election would be the first in the country to be fought on the education plank. “The future of the nation depends on education, but the future of education itself is in the hand of politicians. So, we have to think of education in terms of politics. We have already done politics on religion, region and caste. It doesn’t matter who our bureaucrats are, everything depends on the politicians.”

On his government’s policies, Sisodia said: “This is not the first time a government is working on education, but there has always been the need for a government to take the responsibility of guaranteeing quality education to 95% of the population and not just the 5% in the IITs and, say, St Stephen’s College. That’s where our government comes in.”

He said both government and private schools needed to co-exist even as he insisted that no politician or bureaucrat should be allowed in the management of the latter. He called for a higher budgetary allocation for education. “A new education policy is coming. But for how long will we just keep talking of setting aside 6% of GDP for education? Why not do it? Why not bring in a legislation in that regard?