Mar, 2022. VOL.14. ISSUE NO.1 https://hrdc.gujaratuniversity.ac.in/Ejournal Page | 84 PRE-SERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW OF EDUCATION POLICY IN INDIA Ms. Nidhi Gulati Mr. Manish Jain Abstract This paper provides a review of pre-service teacher education related policies and reports. It looks at the core concerns and outlines a brief trajectory of the policies over time. It points to the continuities and departures of the recent policy with earlier recommendations pertaining to enhanced duration TE programmes, limited institutional capacities, strengthening disciplinary knowledge domains and the question of standards. The paper deliberates on the concerns that the National Education Policy 2020 implementation must be attentive to in order to achieve the policy’s articulated and intended goals. Key words: pre-service teacher education, National Education Policy, 2020 Introduction A series of national and international documents including India’s recent National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 have underscored the centrality of teachers for the success of reforms aimed at school education. This paper presents a historical overview of the policy discourse related to teacher education that reveal continuities and departures with the contemporary recommendations. For this purpose, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section provides a bird’s eye-view of teacher education in India since colonial times to the 1990s. The second section focuses on contemporary shifts as evident in the recent policy recommendations. The third section focuses on NEP (2020), with reference to the pre-service programmes. The conclusion discusses certain challenges and concerns related to the implementation of NEP 2020 with regard to pre-service teacher education. 1. Making teachers: History of Teacher Education in India The Teacher Education (TE) system in India has colonial roots in the monitorial and pupil- teacher system models that helped prepare huge numbers of teachers for the mass education programmes in 19th century England. Danish missionaries started the first teacher training normal school near Calcutta in 1793. By the 1880s, 106 ‘normal’ schools of teacher training were set up