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CHAPTER 12

Promoting Ethics through UGC-CARE and NEP 2020

Vinod K. Jain and Gaurangi Maitra

“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society,
every family.” These wise words of Kofi Annan, (the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations,
from January 1997 to December 2006), reverberate strongly as the second decade of the 21st century
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closes on a bewildering note of pandemics, information, and misinformation, disrupting established
modes of communication, education, and livelihood. We are forced to realize that human civilization
will be not be itself without ethics that determine choices, actions, and suggest difficult priorities. As
John Berger says, “Without ethics man has no future. That is to say mankind without them cannot
be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities”. Consequently, the
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reinforcement and awareness of ethics through relevant policy interventions is vital to realigning the
society, and citizens in consonance with an equitable biosphere.
‘Ethos’ graduated to ‘ethics’ and came to underscore the ‘ethike’, the Greek term originally defined
by Aristotle, meaning the science of morals. This line of development is not unique to the Greek-
Latin-European evolution of the term, but present with individual variations in every human culture.
Both the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are in essence repositories of ethical and
moral reasoning that have guided the civilizations in India for millennia. Life itself is coded into well-
regulated systems that operate on the ethical premise of ‘allowed’ versus ‘not allowed’ to preserve
the dynamic equilibrium that defines every citizen of the biosphere. It is therefore no wonder that
ethics are the very ethos of human life and endeavour. Very early in our academic lessons we learn the
value of a tick mark against a cross; teachers attaining nearly omnipotent status with a red pen that
only they could wield and make or break careers. John Dewey’s statement that education is just not
a preparation for life but life itself validates the fundamental, crucial, and indispensable coexistence
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of education and ethics. It would not be wrong to suggest that life is crippled if education and ethics
are not given their bona fide status. Therefore, it is only natural that in India, the National Education
Policy or NEP 2020, and the University Grants Commission’s Consortium for Academic Research and
Ethics or UGC-CARE endorse ethics as a matter of policy; the former underscores the value of ethics,
while the latter has ethics embedded in its very nomenclature and objectives. In the words of Dr. K.
Kasturirangan, Chairman of the NEP drafting panel, “The NEP 2020 has been crafted to realize a new
system aligned with the aspirational goals of 21st century education, while remaining rooted to Indian
value systems and ethos.” 4

The year 2020, with the Covid-19 leitmotif, began on a rather surprising note. A pay-to-view list
claimed that predatory journals had grown from 4000 in 2017 to a humungous 13,000 journals in
2020. This dangerous trend could easily target and short-circuit virologists and epidemiologists,
battling the Covid-19 pandemic and racing against time to produce a vaccine against the virus. These
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fears are aggravated by global commercial and political exigencies demanding an accelerated vaccine
release, shortcutting established safety and ethical trial norms.
Conversely, on January 2, 2020, Prof. Francis Arnold, announced the retraction of their 2019 paper
on “Site –selective enzymatic C-H amidation for synthesis of diverse lactams as the results were
not reproducible. What is noteworthy is her tweet, “It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I
apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted and did not do my job well” (Arnold, 2019).

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