After resisting the Opposition’s demand to reconstitute the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) for over a year, HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has set up a high-powered committee to find out ways and means to restructure CABE.The six-member committee, headed by former secretary J.C. Pant, has the government’s mandate to not only restructure the CABE but also replace it with a new mechanism which can evaluate/frame the National Education Policy. Fed-up with the slanging match between the Opposition and the ruling NDA over the education policy in Parliament and outside, sources said Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee directed Joshi to set up a committee to restructure CABE and ‘‘end the debate’’.‘‘The CABE is a non-statutory body. It was set up to integrate and evaluate the country’s education policy in 1935 when there were no state councils for educational training and research. Now, every state has its own SCERT which has a representative in the NCERT, making CABE an entirely redundant body,’’ a senior HRD Ministry official said.Other than Pant, the Committee has as its members former principal advisor (Education) who is now in the Planning Commission Kiran Agarwal, former secretary J. Veeraraghavan, former director, UNESCO Institute of Education, R.H. Dave, former V-C, IGNOU, Prof C.C. Anand, former director, NCERT, K. Gopalan and Additional Secretary, Department of Higher Education, Kumud Bansal.
