Tamil Nadu minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan slams NEP: 'Somebody from Delhi setting agenda for state'

Palanivel Thiaga Rajan

Tamil Nadu Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan (PTR) strongly criticised the National Education Policy (NEP), calling it an attempt by the Union government to impose its will on states.

In an interview with The Indian Express, the Minister for IT and Digital Services reiterated the state's stand on the three-language formula and argued that Tamil Nadu's education model has already surpassed many of NEP's goals.

'Centralised' education policy

The minister said that education was originally a state subject in the Constitution and accused the Narendra Modi led central government of overreach by moving it to the Concurrent List. PTR pointed out that Tamil Nadu has maintained its longstanding position and has never accepted any version of the NEP, from 1968 to the present. The minister stood firm and said that the state will continue to resist external mandates on school education.

“Before we get into what the NEP contains, we are democratically opposed to the notion of somebody from Delhi setting the educational agenda for the state of Tamil Nadu,” he said.

“Our performance in the education sector over the last 75 years has been much better. Take any measure of educational progress, be it enrolment in higher education, the number of colleges and universities in the Top 100 or the number of patents filed, Tamil Nadu stands tall at number one in the country. For example, the goal for gross enrolment ratio for higher education set by the new NEP has already been crossed by us 10 years ago. So why should somebody in Delhi tell us how and what to improve?” the minister added.

NEP’s three-language model

PTR highlighted the challenges in implementing the NEP’s three-language model, while reiterating the state’s commitment to the two-language policy. He noted that with over one crore students under the state board, introducing a third language would disproportionately affect students from rural and economically weaker backgrounds.

“There are some thousand Kendra Vidyalayas (KV), CBSE and ICSE board schools which follow the three-language formula. In fact, data suggests that many of them are not being able to implement the three-language formula properly. In Tamil Nadu, KV schools have 109 Hindi teachers and 53 Sanskrit teachers but zero Tamil teachers for a third language. That’s the problem,” he argued.

He also pointed out that even elite international schools follow a two-language system and a third language is unnecessary.

‘Extortion’ by the Centre

PTR also accused the Centre of using various policies, including education, to undermine states’ autonomy. He argued that conditional funding, where the Centre ties financial support under schemes like Samagra Shiksha to the acceptance of NEP, is a form of “extortion.”

“We will never bow down to such unconstitutional coercion. Even if the funds were ten times larger, we would not accept policies that override state rights,” he said.

The minister linked the NEP controversy to the ruling BJP’s alleged efforts to centralise power. He pointed to the Centre’s imposition of Hindi in administrative and educational spaces as part of a larger pattern of political control. “This is not about opposing Hindi as a language but opposing its forced imposition. When Hindi imposition was first attempted during colonial rule in the 1930s, it led to riots and deaths,” he said.

Northern states see no improvement

PTR asserted that the students in the north states are not able to learn even one language properly. “It’s not about NEP in Tamil Nadu. The problem is can you teach enough children one language properly in UP and Bihar? Can you improve the growth rate? And I’m saying this as a patriot, not saying it’s a relative value. There is no future for this country if the poorer, high-population northern states don’t see significant improvement in their per capita and overall outcomes. We want that to be fixed. The party in Delhi, which should be focussed on this issue, is instead trying to berate, browbeat, threaten, extort and blackmail us. That’s why we say we don’t want to lose any more representation,” the minister added.