CBSE likely to launch TV channel by July: Education Ministry

NEW DELHI: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) might be ready with its own TV channel by July, education ministry officials said on June 1, speaking at an interaction with the heads of CBSE schools.

In Budget 2022, education minister Dharmendra Pradhan had announced that the education ministry will be launching 200 TV channels at the cost of Rs 1,000 crore to provide blended learning access to students across the country.

“The education ministry had announced the launch of 200 TV channels. TV channels will be a way to reach a lot more people. We will also be looking more closely at blended learning through TV, radio and other mediums and not just on the internet. CBSE will get one of these channels and this will be coming in another two months, by July hopefully,” said Lamchonghoi Sweety Changsan, additional secretary, department of school education and literacy.

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CBSE chairperson Nidhi Chhibber, when asked about the overlap of many higher education entrance exams, said that a committee has been constituted by the department of higher education to map all the exams to ensure that students get adequate time to prepare for them.

The chairperson also said that the CBSE has formed a committee to look into its bylaws on whether it will be possible to do more collaborations with international boards.

NCF will be out soon

Sanjay Kumar, secretary of the department of school education and literacy, speaking at the same event, said that the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) will be in public domain in “maybe a month’s time or six weeks time”. The ministry of education released the draft NCF on April 6.

The draft NCF has proposed a semester system for Class 12 students and the option to write board exams twice. The draft also proposed to do away with traditional ways of classifying disciplines into science, commerce, and humanities streams, replacing them with broader curricular areas.The ministry has invited comments on the document.

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The secretary also flagged the rising coaching culture and said that children are skipping schools by joining dummy schools.

“Is Kota the model for the country? Then what happens to joyful learning? Children are not coming to school, they are joining dummy schools that will provide them attendance. There is supply and demand. This must be tackled. We must bring back children to school,” said Kumar. Kota, Rajasthan, is known for its sprawling coaching centres aimed to help students crack the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE Main) and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) exams.

School teachers present at the event, however, pointed out that the ministry’s introduction of entrance exams such the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) has further fed this coaching culture.