National Education Policy 2020 and the Revival of Indian Knowledge Systems: Prospects and Challenges

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is one of the most significant changes to the education system in India, which attempts to re-align learning with the civilizational knowledge legacy of the nation, and remain globally competitive. The reestablishment and assimilation of the Indian Knowledge System (IKS) which includes indigenous sciences, traditional health systems, classical languages, ecological wisdom, oral traditions, and culturally based pedagogies is a major facet of this reform. The present paper is the critical analysis of the opportunities and difficulties related to the integration of IKS into the curricular, institutional and pedagogical frameworks provided by NEP 2020. The analysis of documents, academic literature, and government reports on the qualitative and analytic basis of the study shows that NEP 2020 is the first national policy to institutionalize IKS on all levels of education. Nonetheless, it has major limitations like lack of trained teachers, insufficient academic structures to standardize IKS, and structural loopholes in the framework of higher education systems. Nevertheless, IKS has enormous potentials in the restoration of cultural continuity, diversification of knowledge streams, and placing India as an international provider of alternative knowledge systems in case integrated scientifically and strategically.