(a) Explain the sociological significance of the New Education Policy and its thrust on vocationalization and skill development…

(a) Sociological significance of NEP 2020 and its thrust on vocationalisation and skills

NEP 2020 replaces the 10+2 structure with 5+3+3+4, brings vocational exposure from Class 6 with internships, and introduces multiple entry and exit and an Academic Bank of Credit.

Significance:

• Credentialism: Ronald Dore's "diploma disease" and Randall Collins's credential society describe education pursued for certificates rather than capability. Vocational integration and credit-based learning aim to weaken the white-collar bias that ranks manual and technical work as inferior, a caste-linked hierarchy of labour.
• Human capital: it targets the mismatch between schooling and labour-market skills, and graduate unemployment.
• Equity: multiple exits and certification reduce all-or-nothing dropout, which falls hardest on girls, Dalits, Adivasis and poor families; mother-tongue instruction and special focus on socio-economically disadvantaged groups address access.
• Social reproduction: Bourdieu and Bowles and Gintis warn that vocational tracks can steer poorer and lower-caste students to low-status routes while elites take academic ones, reproducing inequality; costs, digital divide and private provision may deepen this.

Its success depends on quality of training, industry links, and removing the stigma attached to skilled manual work.

(b) Is ageing an emerging issue in India? Major problems of the old

Yes. UNFPA's India Ageing Report 2023 puts the 60-plus share at 10.5 per cent in 2022, rising to about 20.8 per cent by 2050. Longevity is rising, the working-age share will eventually shrink, and families are changing.

Major problems:

• Economic insecurity: most elders worked in the informal sector with no pension, so they depend on family, work longer, or rely on limited schemes such as NSAP pensions.
• Health: rising chronic disease and costs of care, weak geriatric services; mental health and dementia are poorly addressed.
• Family change: migration and nuclearisation, with about one-fifth of elders living alone or only with a spouse; loneliness and neglect.
• Abuse and legal gaps: elder abuse and property disputes; the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 is weakly enforced.
• Gendered ageing: women outlive men, with higher widowhood, lower assets and pensions.
• Digital exclusion from services.

Ageing is a structural issue needing social security, health and community-based care.

(c) Socio-cultural factors behind India's skewed sex ratio

• Son preference: sons are seen as continuing the lineage, performing rites and giving old-age security under patrilineal and patrilocal systems.
• Dowry and the cost of daughters: marriage costs and hypergamy make daughters a perceived burden.
• Property and inheritance norms that favour sons, despite legal equality.
• Technology and weak enforcement: sex-selective abortion through ultrasound, despite the PCPNDT Act, 1994; neglect of girls after birth also raises child mortality.
• Regional pattern: skew is sharper in Punjab, Haryana and parts of the north-west (Census 2011 child sex ratio 919 nationally), and also among educated, prosperous households, showing the problem is cultural as well as economic.

Change requires shifts in inheritance, dowry and gender norms, along with enforcement.