It is a matter of great privilege and honor for me to be here on this occasion when the Hon’ble Vice President is inaugurating the birth of a very important institution. On my personal behalf and my institution, NCERT, I congratulate the founders’ of this institution and I wish them a great future.

For the NCERT to be happy on this occasion is a natural outcome of its long history in its attempt to innovate and provide the basis for further policy making to improve the quality of education in India. On this occasion it is important for me to highlight some of the debates on this question of quality which were part of the formation of National Curriculum Framework document which has now a status of a policy document having been approved by the Central Advisory Board of Education in 2005.

The quality debate has certain history in the context of education especially in the recent past. We try to trace usage of this word in educational discourses and found an early use made by an American philosopher John Dewey who wrote in his book “Democracy and Education” in 1916 that - A measure of Quality is the extent to which the goals of a system have been understood by all levels those who function in that system. When we try to reflect on this system of education, we thought that no document provides India a better sense of the goals of education than the Constitution of India. The Constitution of India suggests that for India to develop in a society which has peace and justice guiding it, then it must look at peace as an outcome of justice.

In the light of this broader vision, the National Curriculum Framework took cognizance of the fact that India continues to have not only a divided education system but in fact a divisive system.

On account of this divided condition in which our child lives, we have quite often found ourselves in situations where it is very difficult for schools to follow the great ideas of education which were set by founding fathers like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindra Nath Tagore. One of the principles that arises out of this thought process that went into the national struggle was the thought which is actually, universally acknowledge fact now that the more the heterogeneity of children a classroom, the greater will be the quality of learning taking place there. This is the long struggle that Europe went through over 200 years of its struggle to establish common school system.

The National Curriculum Framework perceives the constitution as guiding light which still demands from us that we critically and dispassionately look at our endeavors and attempt to create an inclusive system for our children. Such a system can not be created unless we begin to see that every child has a different potential to offer to the national life. And that potential can not be minimized into a predictable set of outcome.

Today as EQFI begins its arduous journey which can only be taken good for a system in which indicators of quality have been very limited; it needs to remember that the measure of quality today over the last 20 or 25 years in various parts of the world has become very garbled with the discourse of management.

The UNESCO report on the Global Monitoring of Quality 2003, reminds us repeatedly that the educational institutions can not be judged by standards which are either linked only to infrastructure or only to the qualification of teachers’ or only to outcomes, because quality has a value dimension also and this is what the National Curriculum Framework of 2005 eloquently says in its chapter five that value dimension is really a measure of the extent to which a differentiated clientele can be found in each and every classroom. And no child is stopped from realizing his or her potential on the ground that he or she comes from a certain background.

The EQFI is beginning its journey in a very difficult social environment today in which many of our best school have begun to forget that even basic quality like punctuality and good behaviors have to have an intrinsic birth. They can not be achieved by CCTVs in every class. Unfortunately the CCTV movement is spreading. It started from Gujrat and has spread to Delhi and being spread to Calcutta. Many Principals have begun to believe that this close circuit television camera which is a very useful instrument to have at airports and bus stands is also necessary for schools. The National Curriculum Framework reminds us that any technology or any norm which takes away the intrinsic value of the human being is ultimately a threat to those values. And today as we begin to look at schools, Government Schools and Private Schools indeed the entire system from the perspective of quality, we must remember that quality is not only a measure of efficiency, quality is also a measure of basic character of education.