Mumbai: The plan to start a special Maharashtra International Education Board (MIEB) for state-run schools was scrapped by state education minister Varsha Gaikwad on Wednesday.
It was the pet project of the former state education minister and BJP leader Vinod Tawde, who wanted to provide international education standards at the local level.
Through MIEB, students would have had an opportunity to study international curriculum with a focus on life skills, experiential learning, self-reliance, self-sufficiency and regional languages, apart from English. Tawde said, “The idea of the project was to provide international curriculum to students studying in rural areas of Maharashtra.
It would have provided an opportunity to students of zilla parishad (ZP) schools to study an international curriculum with a focus on Marathi language.”
In May 2018, the curriculum was being formulated within the framework of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) by a governing council.
Members of the council, such as nuclear physicist and mechanical engineer Anil Kakodkar, computer scientist Vijay Bhatkar and Sonam Wangchuk, known as the 'Phunsukh Wangdu' of Ladakh, were part of the governing council.
Mukund Kulkarni, state BJP office secretary, claimed the decision to scrap the MIEB will affect students of ZP schools. Kulkarni said, “The aim of this curriculum was to make available international education to students of rural areas of the state. But now, they will not be able to do so.”
A total of 81 schools affiliated to the new board were waiting to open admissions for the academic year 2020-21. After the change in the state government, the contracts of several officials on the board were not renewed, which adversely affected its functioning. The current state government received several complaints about lack of transparency in the board's functioning.
In 2018, 13 ZP schools had started the MIEB curriculum. A member of the MIEB board, “A budget of over Rs 10 crore was spent on formulating the curriculum to start this new MIEB. Now, both the effort and money has gone to waste.”
