Match the following :
(a) Dr. Radhakrushanan Commission
(b) Mudliyar Commission
(c) N.C.E.R.T. establishment
(d) Dr. Kothari Commission
(i) 1949
(ii) 1952
(iii) 1961
(iv) 1964

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), the straight-through match: (a)-(i), (b)-(ii), (c)-(iii), (d)-(iv). The four items are the four landmarks of education policy in the first two decades after independence, in the order they occurred. Statement (a), printed here as the Dr. Radhakrushanan Commission and named after Dr S. Radhakrishnan, is the University Education Commission, the first body the new government appointed to examine higher education; it was set up in 1948 and reported in 1949, and its central recommendation was that the existing University Grants Committee be reconstituted on the model of the University Grants Commission of the United Kingdom with a full-time chairman — a recommendation that produced the UGC, inaugurated in 1953 and made statutory by Act of Parliament in 1956. Statement (b), printed as the Mudliyar Commission and named after Dr A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, is the Secondary Education Commission, appointed in 1952 and reporting the following year; it looked at the layer the first commission had left untouched and recommended the diversified multipurpose school, a three-year degree course above it, and the reorganisation of the secondary stage. Statement (c) is the establishment of the National Council of Educational Research and Training in 1961, the body that took over curriculum, textbooks and teacher education for the school system and that still writes the textbooks most examinations are set from. Statement (d) is the Kothari Commission, formally the Education Commission, appointed in 1964 under Dr D. S. Kothari; it was the first body to survey education at every stage as a single system, it gave India the ten-plus-two-plus-three structure and the common school ideal, and its report of 1966 became the basis of the National Policy on Education of 1968. The chain is therefore university, then secondary, then the institution to service the schools, then the comprehensive review — and once that chain is held in order, the year that goes with each is fixed.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This choice swaps both pairs. It puts the University Education Commission in 1952 and the Secondary Education Commission in 1949, and it puts the establishment of the NCERT in 1964 and the Kothari Commission in 1961. The first swap inverts the order in which the two commissions actually sat, and that order is not arbitrary: independent India looked at the universities first, in the year after independence, and came to school education only in the following decade. The second swap does the same violence to the school story, since the NCERT was created before the Kothari Commission was appointed and was one of the instruments through which the Commission's recommendations were later carried into the classroom.  (b) This is the dangerous choice, because its first two rows are right: it gives 1949 to the University Education Commission and 1952 to the Secondary Education Commission, exactly as the key does. It then reverses the last two, dating the NCERT to 1964 and the Kothari Commission to 1961. A candidate who checks only the first row or two before committing will take it. The discriminator is the relationship between the two institutions: the NCERT of 1961 is a permanent body created to service school education, whereas the Kothari Commission of 1964 was a temporary commission of enquiry that reported in 1966, and the Commission's proposals were implemented partly through the Council that already existed. The order cannot be reversed.  (c) This choice dates the University Education Commission to 1961, the Secondary Education Commission to 1949, the NCERT to 1964 and the Kothari Commission to 1952, and every row of it is out of place. The single quickest way to reject it is the first row: the commission on university education is the earliest of the four items and belongs at the beginning of the sequence, so any choice that pushes it to the middle of the 1960s has misread the whole chronology. Chronological questions of this kind are best attacked by fixing the earliest and the latest items first, which here means the University Education Commission and the Kothari Commission, since the two middle items are then forced.

Concept: Education policy in India between 1948 and 1966 was built in layers, each addressing what the previous one had left out. The University Education Commission examined higher education and produced the UGC. The Secondary Education Commission examined the school stage that fed the universities and produced the multipurpose school and the reorganised secondary curriculum. The NCERT was then created in 1961 as a permanent national body for school curriculum, textbooks, research and teacher training, absorbing several existing central institutions. Finally the Kothari Commission, appointed in 1964 and reporting in 1966, treated the whole system at once — primary, secondary, higher, technical and teacher education together — and made the recommendations that shaped what followed: a common school system, the three-language formula, education as a proportion of national income, and the ten-plus-two-plus-three pattern that replaced the varying provincial structures. Its report fed directly into the National Policy on Education of 1968, the first such policy statement, which was revised in 1986 and superseded by the National Education Policy of 2020.

State PCS 2021 Q7 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q7 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer