National Education Day is an annual event observed in India on November 11. It is observed to commemorate the birth anniversary of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first education minister of independent India, who served from August 15, 1947 till February 2, 1958.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development, had on September 11, 2008 announced, “the Ministry has decided to commemorate the birthday of this great son of India by recalling his contribution to the cause of education in India”.
The National Education Day is celebrated with the objective to strengthen our educational institutions and to raise the quality of education to greater heights. It is an occasion to remember Maulana Azad’s contribution in laying the foundations of the education system in an independent India as well as to evaluate our current performance in this field. In 1992, he was posthumously awarded India’s highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.
On this day, all people who are involved in the field of education come together to seek ways to advance India’s prestige in the world, as a knowledge society and to focus on how to educate our people. Educational institutions at all levels across the country will celebrate November 11 as the ‘National Education Day’ by the way of Seminars, symposia, essay-writing, elocution competitions, workshops and rallies with banner cards and slogans on the importance of literacy and nation’s commitment to all aspects of education.
The 2016 theme for the National Education Day has been ‘skill-awareness and empowerment’.
For this purpose, schools were asked to nominate a teacher and a student, who have been consistently and extensively involved in projects related to building of sustainable skills within the system and in enhancing skills in the community around them. They worked on themes like sanitation, inclusive education, entrepreneurship, promoting health and well-being, empowering the girl child, adopting a school, gender sensitization, and environmental issues, in their respective schools.