What were the main principles of the National Education Policy of 1968 based on the recommendations of the Kothari Commission ?
(a) Compulsory and free education till the age of 14 years.
(b) Higher p

Question

What were the main principles of the National Education Policy of 1968 based on the recommendations of the Kothari Commission ?
(a) Compulsory and free education till the age of 14 years.
(b) Higher position and improved pay for teachers.
(c) At least 10% of gross national income spent on education.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), 'Only (a) and (b)'. This question prints only three statements, (a) to (c), so the whole item turns on a single number. Statement (a) is right: the National Policy on Education of 1968, drawing on the Education Commission of 1964–66 under Dr. D. S. Kothari, restated the goal of free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of fourteen, which was the directive already written into Article 45 of the Constitution and which the policy treated as the country's first educational obligation. Statement (b) is right as well: the 1968 policy is explicit that of all the factors determining the quality of education the teacher matters most, and it accordingly called for teachers to be given an honoured place in society and for their emoluments and service conditions to be made adequate — the 'higher position and improved pay' of the printed statement. Statement (c) is where the question is decided. The Kothari Commission's celebrated financial recommendation was that investment in education should be raised to six per cent of national income, a target it set for the mid-1980s and which the 1968 policy adopted; the figure printed here, ten per cent, is not the recommendation and never has been. Since (c) is false, every option containing it goes, and only option (1) is left. The six per cent figure is worth fixing in memory because it has outlived the policy that first carried it: it was restated in the National Policy on Education of 1986 and again in the National Education Policy of 2020, and it remains the standard benchmark against which India's actual public spending on education is measured.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This option accepts the false ten-per-cent figure in statement (c) and, worse, rejects statement (a), the free and compulsory education of children up to fourteen. That commitment is the constitutional heart of the 1968 policy — Article 45 of the Directive Principles set it as a goal to be reached within ten years of the Constitution's commencement, and the policy of 1968 restated it because it had not been achieved. Dropping it while keeping a misquoted spending target inverts the relative importance of the two propositions.  (c) This option keeps the false ten-per-cent figure and discards statement (b), the improvement of teachers' status and pay. The teacher clause is one of the most-quoted parts of the 1968 policy, which held that no education system can rise above the quality of its teachers and therefore linked national development to their emoluments and service conditions. A candidate choosing this option has probably remembered that the Kothari report named a percentage of national income without remembering which percentage, and has then paired that half-memory with the one statement everyone recalls.  (d) 'All of the above' can only be right if every printed statement is true, and here statement (c) is not: the recommended level of investment was six per cent of national income, not ten. This option is the natural landing place for a candidate who recognises that the policy did commit to free and compulsory education, did promise better treatment for teachers, and did name a spending target, and who therefore accepts the third statement on the strength of the first two. In statement-set questions the presence of a single wrong figure is enough to remove an otherwise attractive omnibus option.

Concept: The Education Commission of 1964–66, universally called the Kothari Commission after its chairman Dr. D. S. Kothari, then chairman of the University Grants Commission, was the first body to review Indian education as a whole from the primary school to the university. Its report, Education and National Development, opened with the sentence that 'the destiny of India is now being shaped in her classrooms', and its recommendations included a common school system to reduce social segregation, the 10+2+3 pattern of school and college education, the three-language formula, work experience and social service in the curriculum, and the raising of public investment in education to six per cent of national income. The National Policy on Education of 1968 was the government's formal response, and it is India's first national education policy — which is why the pair 'Kothari Commission and NEP 1968' is examined as a unit, the commission supplying the reasoning and the policy the commitment.

State PCS 2024 Q9 — History PYQ with Answer

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