UKPSC Prelims 2025 General Studies Paper-I · Question 68 of 149

Correct — B, 1944.

The scheme takes its name from Sir John Sargent, Educational Adviser to the Government of India, who drafted a memorandum titled 'Post-War Educational Development in India'. The Central Advisory Board of Education put it out in 1944, while the war was still running and post-war reconstruction was being planned.

Its central promise was free and compulsory basic education for children aged 6 to 14, with pre-primary schooling below that age and high school education above it for selected pupils. The whole programme was pitched at a horizon of about forty years.

Fix it as a wartime, pre-independence blueprint drawn up under British rule, not a scheme of the independent Indian state. That placement rules out 1948, the only post-independence date on offer; 1902 and 1856 are excluded on other grounds, since they belong to earlier and different measures.

• (a)
  1902 — 1902 is the year Lord Curzon appointed the Indian Universities Commission under Thomas Raleigh.

  Its subject was the governance of universities — affiliation, teaching, the powers of senates — and its recommendations were carried into the Indian Universities Act of 1904.

  That is a university-control measure at the height of Curzon's administration, four decades before the Sargent memorandum and aimed at a different level of the system.

• (c)
  1948 — 1948 is when independent India began taking stock of higher education: the University Education Commission under Dr S. Radhakrishnan was appointed that year.

  The same year a committee headed by B. G. Kher was set up to examine how far the Sargent scheme's forty-year timetable could be compressed.

  So 1948 attaches to the review and follow-up of the plan, which is precisely what makes it a tempting date — but the plan itself was already four years old by then.

• (d)
  1856 — 1856 sits in the Company period. The best-known measure of that year is the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, a social-reform statute rather than an education scheme.

  The education landmark of that decade is Wood's Despatch of 1854, which pressed for a graded system from primary school to university and led to Departments of Public Instruction and, in 1857, the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.

  Either way the date belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century, generations before Sargent.

Colonial education policy in India moves through a chain of named documents — a minute, a despatch, commissions, committees — and each is remembered by the person or office attached to it and the year it appeared.

The Sargent Report is the wartime member of that chain. It was prepared under the Central Advisory Board of Education in 1944 and named for Sir John Sargent, the Government's Educational Adviser.

What makes it distinctive is scope. Earlier documents adjusted one part of the system; this one proposed a structure for the whole of it, from nursery school to university, to be built over roughly forty years.

• The Sargent Report of 1944 was formally titled 'Post-War Educational Development in India'.
• It is named after Sir John Sargent, Educational Adviser to the Government of India.
• It was brought out under the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE).
• It proposed free and compulsory basic education for children aged 6 to 14.
• It provided for pre-primary education for children aged about 3 to 6.
• It proposed high school education for selected pupils after the basic stage, and a three-year university degree course.
• It also covered teacher training, adult literacy, technical and commercial education, and school health services.
• It set a target period of roughly forty years for the scheme to be realised.
• A committee under B. G. Kher, appointed in 1948, examined shortening that forty-year period.
• Wood's Despatch was issued in 1854, the Hunter Commission was appointed in 1882, and the Sadler Commission on Calcutta University worked in 1917-19.

• The adviser's name is spelt Sargent, while this stem and the two cited papers print 'Sargeant'. Recognise the document, not the spelling.
• 1948 is genuinely linked to the plan through the Kher Committee's review; a year attached to a topic is not the year the topic began.
• Sargent held an advisory post and the memorandum came out through CABE, so hunting for a chairman-and-commission label misfiles this document.
• Its language of universal elementary education reads like national planning, which can pull the date across 1947; it was framed while the British still governed.
• Three options in the UPPSC 2018 set end on the Sargent Plan and two in the UPSC 1997 set do, so in neither question does placing Sargent last settle the answer — the earlier landmarks still have to be ordered.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 1944 report on 'Post-War Educational Development in India', popularly called the Sargent Plan, was brought out under which body?

  • (a)Hartog Committee
  • (b)Central Advisory Board of Education
  • (c)Indian Universities Commission
  • (d)University Grants Commission
  Answerb — the Central Advisory Board of Education, which brought out the memorandum drafted by Sir John Sargent, Educational Adviser to the Government of India, in 1944.

  The Hartog Committee reported in 1929 as an auxiliary committee attached to the Indian Statutory Commission. The Indian Universities Commission belongs to 1902 and fed the Universities Act of 1904.

  The UGC in its present form dates from 1953 (statutory under the UGC Act, 1956), on the University Education Commission's recommendation, and even its 1945 predecessor postdates the report.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Arrange the following in correct chronological order: 1. Wood's Despatch 2. Hunter Commission 3. Sadler Commission 4. Sargent Report

  • (a)1, 2, 3, 4
  • (b)2, 1, 3, 4
  • (c)1, 3, 2, 4
  • (d)1, 2, 4, 3
  Answera — Wood's Despatch (1854), Hunter Commission (1882), Sadler Commission (1917-19), Sargent Report (1944).

  Option b puts Hunter before Wood's Despatch, reversing a gap of nearly thirty years. Option c puts Sadler before Hunter, moving a twentieth-century commission ahead of a nineteenth-century one.

  Option d keeps the first two right but ends with Sadler after Sargent, which places 1917 after 1944.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sargent Plan proposed free and compulsory basic education for children of which age group?

  • (a)3 to 6 years
  • (b)6 to 11 years
  • (c)6 to 14 years
  • (d)11 to 17 years
  Answerc — the report asked for free, universal and compulsory basic education for all children between 6 and 14, and that whole band is the keyed answer.

  Option a is the pre-primary stage the plan also provided for, as nursery schooling rather than compulsory basic education. Option b is only the junior basic stage, 6 to 11; senior basic ran from 11 to 14, and the compulsory demand covered both halves.

  Option d is the high school range, which the plan offered to selected pupils rather than to everyone.