Five days ago, we celebrated the thirteenth National Education Day to commemorate the 133rd birth anniversary of the first Education Minister of independent India, Mohiuddin Ahmad Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, popularly known as Maulana Azad. Since 2008, we have been celebrating it each year on 11 November as a mark of respect to the person who made a monumental contribution to the cause of education. This occasion is justly used by the academic fraternity to underscore the significance of education in the life of a nation-state. A number of activities in the form of webinars, debates, declamation contests and exhibitions are organised by the institutions across the country to highlight Maulana Azad’s unparalleled contribution in laying the foundation of education for a nascent nation.
Maulana Azad, a stalwart of the freedom movement, had joined the interim government as Education Minister in January 1947 and continued in the same capacity for eleven long years, until his passing away in1958. Maulana Azad was given a far more arduous task than his contemporaries in the Council of Ministers. There was no national system of education. The country was rock bottom with an 18% literacy rate and 209,671 primary schools, 13,596 upper primary schools, 7,416 secondary schools, 578 colleges and only 27 universities. This was all that Maulana Azad had inherited in the form of infrastructure on which he had to lay the foundation of modern India. As it is, he had insurmountable challenges, which became even more daunting in the absence of a proper system of teacher preparation and scarcity of resources.
Although Maulana Azad had a basket full of problems throughout his tenure as the Minister of Education, he being a visionary had the knack to set priorities and maximise the potential of limited resources. Thus he chose to focus on teacher preparation as a case of first-thing-first. He knew that the country could not move forward without a well-established system of teacher preparation, which was almost non-existent. So, soon after Independence, he established the Central Institute of Education (CIE), Delhi in 1947 and while laying its foundation he said that the institute would not merely be a model institute for teacher preparation but a pioneering centre of research in school education.
Maulana Azad knew it for sure that higher education was the real pathway for social and economic development. Therefore, within a span of a few months after his taking over the office of the Minister of Education, he appointed the University Education Commission (UEC) on 4 November1948 under the Chairmanship of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to suggest improvement and extension that would be desirable to suit present and future requirements of the country. He was also equally alarmed with the range of development in engineering and technology which he thought could not be achieved without establishing the premier institutions in the field of engineering and allied sciences. He took cues from both the Sarkar Committee (1945) and the recommendations of the UEC (1949) and acted so swiftly that he founded the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1950 at Kharagpur. And, while inaugurating the IIT, Kharagpur on 18 August 1951 he said: “I felt that of the many tasks of educational reconstruction that faced the country, two were of paramount urgency. The first was the creation of a nationwide system of basic education for all children of school-going age, and the second the provision of facilities of the highest type of education in the technical field.” He fulfilled both. He laid the foundation of four more IITs on paper, though they were formally opened up after his demise on 22 February 1958.
No sooner Maulana Azad received the recommendations of the University Education Commission in 1949 than he realised that higher education cannot be strengthened without rejuvenating the feeder cadre. So, he set up another Commission, ‘the Secondary Education Commission (SEC)’, under the chairmanship of Dr A. Lakshmanswami Mudaliar in 1952 to examine the existing system of secondary education in the country and to suggest measures to improve it. The commission made a number of vital recommendations leading to improvement in the methods of teaching, integration of vocational education, establishment of National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Regional Colleges of Education (RCEs) at Ajmer, Bhopal, Mysore and Bhubaneswar, to name a few.
Like a true statesperson, Maulana Azad was also keenly interested in promoting India’s external cultural relations, through cultural exchange, with other countries and their people and for that he founded the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) on 9 April 1950. It paved the way for the establishment of a number of other councils like Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR) and Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), though they came into existence a little later after his demise.
Maulana Azad believed as much in Fine Arts and Music as in Science and Technology. He had great admiration for the preservation and expansion of intangible assets of the country. So, he was also instrumental in the establishment of a number of Akademies namely the Sangeet Natak Akademy (1953) for performing arts namely music, dance and drama, the Sahitya Akademy (1954) for the promotion of literature in the languages of India and through them all the cultural unity of the country, and Lalit Kala Akademy for the promotion of cultural and national identity, which he had inaugurated on 5 August 1954.
Maulana Azad is credited to have laid out a massive roadmap for all kinds of educational institutions to put India on the path of cultural harmony and scientific advancement. It was during his tenure that the country had witnessed the first wave of incredible expansion of public institutions and that was the time when the country was treading on a sluggish economy and spending only 0.68% of its GDP on education. He was the first person who envisioned as early as in 1950 that education in the country, which was a state subject then, could not reach the desired standard without an acceptable level of intervention from the Central government. It took 26 years for the seed sown by him to sprout, when education was brought on to the concurrent list of the Union of India in 1976.
Maulana Azad was the most distinguished scholar and a well-regarded statesman who had never done anything that could be seen as controversial from any social or political prism. He was a true nationalist and a staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He could never reconcile with the idea of Partition of the country. In fact he was so saddened by Partition that he could not contain his emotions and said: “That if this political defeat had to be accepted, we at the same time try to ensure that our culture was not defeated.” He was a great advocate of ‘social inclusion’ and ‘unity in diversity’. This is what he preached and practised throughout his life. Having regard to the diversity of the country he had put forward the policy of three-language formula. This was as complex an issue then as it is today but he brought it forward for the first time before the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) in 1956 with a view to evolving a consensus in the light of socio-political needs and constitutional requirements.
Maulana Azad worked throughout his life for the democratisation of education as he held a belief that it could alone ensure social progress and real empowerment. He was honestly committed about building a flexible and resilient system of education wherein equity and quality go hand-in-hand. Indeed, he was a remarkable person of extraordinary qualities who possessed the inner strength to be truthful to himself and others. He always chose to stand by the right, no matter what the results might be. It was because of his exceptional qualities and scintillating performance that he was awarded with the highest civilian award of the Republic of India, ‘Bharat Ratna’, in 1992. People of the country, indeed, would eternally reminisce about his unparalleled contributions to the cause of education and his persona inevitably would continue to inspire posterity.
The best way to pay homage to Maulana Azad would be to follow his ideals and learn out of his experiences especially the art of maximising the potential of limited resources for scientific and technological advancement of the country and the significance of visionary leadership in education as it fuels all other sectors of economy. Since his birthday is being celebrated as National Education Day, it is an occasion to introspect and recognise what is ailing our education system and how it can be fixed under the current circumstances so that we can ceaselessly keep churning out men and women of substance who develop confidence in one another and handle themselves in a noble and ethical manner.
The writer is former Chairman, UGC. The views expressed are personal.