Bharatiya Shiksha Board – The Vedic Education Schools of India

Education is of key importance to India. In furtherance of the same, the Government of India keeps bringing forward different kinds of reforms in order to raise the standards of education in the nation. Recently, the idea of establishing the Bharatiya Shiksha Board has been conceived. It is being established with the primary motive of standardising vedic education in India.

Similar to any other school, the Bharatiya Shiksha Board will draft its own syllabus and shall conduct exams and issue degrees and certificates upon successful completion of any course pursued under its affiliation. All key decisions related to education are taken by the HRD Ministry in India. The Maharshi Sandipani Rashtriya Vedavidya Pratishthan (MSRVP) is a fully funded autonomous body under the HRD Ministry. The governing council of the MSRVP has lately given its in principal approval to set up a Bharatiya Shiksha Board (BSB). This approval was given in a meeting of the MSRVP governing council. The HRD minister Prakash Javadekar is the chairman of the governing council. Presently, the governing council has been requested to draft the bylaws and the regulations of the board. The major task to be performed by the BSB shall be of standardising vedic education. At the same time, it will also offer new kind of schools that shall promote a blend of the Vedic and modern education. First shall be those kind of schools that shall offer Vedas and Sanskrit as main subjects and modern subjects as minor subjects. Second shall be those kind of schools that shall offer modern day subjects as the main subjects and Vedas and Sanskrit as minor subjects. Third shall be schools that will teach general education in Sanskrit.  Fourth shall be schools that will teach evening vedas. Last but not the least, fifth will be Sanskrit schools. The establishment of these schools shall prove to be of great benefit for other educational institutions such as Acharyakulam, Vidya Bharti schools (run by RSS) and the gurukuls that are taken care of by the Arya Samaj by allowing them to carry forward their model of education up to Class XII, which uptil now school boards like CBSE do not allow. A proposal on similar terms was also floated by the Haridwar based Vedic Education Research Institute (VERI) run by Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth. This proposal could not be implemented because it did not receive the assent of the then education secretary SC Khuntia on the grounds that if they shall grant permission for this model, then other private boards shall also put forward similar requests from other unrecognized school boards.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: http://indianexpress.com/article/education/to-blend-vedic-and-modern-studies-hrd-body-clears-bhartiya-shiksha-board-5534352