on the contrary, the reason NEP came about in 2020 is because one of the points made by the industry was taken aboard by this gormint(central).
policy side background goes like this:
UPA and affiliated intellectuals, for almost a decade prior to 2014 were saying, India missed the manufacturing bus. service sector is our pathway to growth. adding more sectors to industry was not on their agenda because their economic worldview was limited to wealth redistribution by the state and not wealth redistribution via economic growth. aka nehruvian socialism.
NDA gormint disagreed with this, their economic worldview is that poverty alleviation has to come thru economic growth, meaning there has to be additional wealth in the basket to re-distribute within the society in a productive manner. their point was, all avenues of job creation including manufacturing will have to be explored, even if it goes against prevailing global opinion pre-2015 that India will be world's backoffice and IT, china will be manufacturing power house, europe will be knowledge economy, and U.S will be economic and security guarantor of the world.
farm laws, focus on textiles, focus on tourism and even space and defence manufacturing etc, all of them are based on same core fundamental i.e exploring more avenues of economic growth and job creation.
once it has been decided revival of manufacturing has to be undertaken, Industry's point was, people with degrees are of no use to our companies, if they don't have skill. this gap occurred in the first place, because previous central gormint did not focus on skilling, states like TN did because their industrial policy is one of the best in the country for decades. companies wanted to frontload the skills education during the education phase, instead of having to run 6 month courses after giving employment letters, or at the minimum as much skill to be imparted during education phase so that remaining delta can happen after giving employment letter.
some companies like tata's have gone to the extent of saying, we are willing to put in our own money to up-skill students, contributing to local and national pool of skilled labour, irrespective of whether they join TATA or not.
that's when NEP came about, media wallahs focussed on language and history because their worldview is marxist, but NEP's main goal is to make the students ready for the jobs.
then comes the issue of gap between demand and supply, there will always be a lag because of the scale of the country. but in the case of education, it is largely dependant on state gormints.
how your discussion fits into this background is that, analytical thinking has a correlation with high level skills, and skills have a correlation with jobs, and skilled jobs have a correlation with economic growth.
