Hrushikesh Senapaty Joined as NCERT Director

Professor Hrushikesh Senapaty has joined as Director of National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)on Monday. Prior to this appointment he was heading Regional Institute of Education (RIE), Bhopal (a constituent unit of NCERT), as its principal.

The position of director of NCERT has been lying vacant for over a year after Pravin Sinclair was unceremoniously ousted last year. In a meeting of the search-cum-selection committee on August 24 headed by Md. Akhtar Siddiqui names of Senapaty and Anil Shukla were shortlisted.

Senapaty is an alumnus of BJB College Bhubaneswar and Devi Ahilya Bai University, Indore. He joined Regional Institute of Education, Bhopal in 1997 as associate professor in education.

His area of specialization has been teacher education and information and communications technology in education (ICTE). He is an UNESCO expert on ICTE from India. He has more than 25 years of experience in teaching, training, research and extension activities. In addition to many areas concerning school education, he has also worked on integration of ICT into Constructivist Theory of Learning to bring a paradigm shift in the Teacher Education practices. As an UNESCO expert he has visited many countries especially for working on the area of ICTE.

The search committee consisted of G C Tripathi, vice-chancellor, Banaras Hindu University, I K Bhat, director, NIT, Jaipur, Shyama Chona, former principal, DPS, RK Puram and M K Sridhar, professor, Canara Bank School of Management Studies (CBSMS) and member of Karnataka Knowledge Commission.

The immediate task before Senapaty will be to accelerate the process of consultation on the proposed New Education Policy. NCERT has been tasked to take forward few crucial components of the NEP. He will also have to take a stock of the review of text books as well as formulate the new curriculum framework. The last curriculum framework was devised in 2005 for a decade.