Birth of an idea: A few years ago, I asked a former cabinet minister, “What’s your vision for education”? He replied, “Open more and more schools”, to which I blurted, “Will opening more schools open the minds”? The seeds of the new policy were sown after that discussion. When I was drafting the election manifesto of the BJP under an erudite scholar, Prof. Murli Manohar Joshi (chairman of the BJPs Manifesto Committee), we discussed this issue in detail. As a former Union HRD Minister, Joshi was clear that after the Kothari Commission, we haven’t looked at the policy holistically, and that we should come out with a new education policy after a careful study of the recent developments. Thus, the idea of new National Education Policy (NEP) was transformed into an electoral promise, which has finally seen the light of the day. After 1986, we have an education policy after almost four decades.