The leak of centralised NEET examination papers, the chaotic conduct of the CUET examination for admission to central universities, and the shambles of the on-screen marking system for CBSE examinations—all within the space of a fortnight in 2026—have exposed the crisis in India’s education system. No one is being held accountable for the fact that the futures, and in too many cases the lives, of the nation’s youth are being endangered by the corruption and incompetence over which the central government and the Education Ministry are presiding.

The Prime Minister is silent. The Education Minister claims the issues will be resolved within a fortnight. Trust is in short supply when two teenagers were able to expose a systemic failure that the ministry had been warned about by its own committee—warnings set aside because the top leadership had instructed immediate implementation of new policies, with credit for “having changed the system within 12 years” already being claimed.

It is here that the ultimate cause of the crisis must be sought: in the policies themselves, and in the unseemly haste to implement them.

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) claimed to be breaking new ground, poised to achieve what no previous education policy had managed in more than 70 years—providing quality education for India’s children and youth. Yet the policy process itself revealed both procedural inadequacies and a failure to analyse the obstacles that had confronted earlier policies. Three versions were formulated and dropped before NEP 2020 was adopted by the Cabinet during the pandemic—without referral to a standing committee of Parliament for debate. No State governments were meaningfully involved, even though education is constitutionally in the Concurrent List. Several State governments raised objections to federal rights being usurped by the Union government. The policy was foisted on the States with the threat that failure to adopt it would result in the loss of central education grants.

A system of education, and a policy for its implementation, form an integral part of a social order. The policy decision to make school education universal is not merely a question of reaching statistical targets. Every child’s right to education provides the impetus for universalising it—and with that comes a claim on the State, not merely to protect those rights but to ensure they are realised in ways consistent with the constitutional principles of equality and justice.

Caste and colony

The entrenched nature of discrimination, oppression, and exclusion in Indian society must be confronted if education policy is to be taken seriously. The impact of the caste system and colonial rule—neither of which is even mentioned in NEP 2020—requires to be foregrounded. The century-long struggle against imperial domination eventually generated the demand for liberty, equality, and fraternity in a meaningful sense. Consequently, earlier education policies were shaped by the idea that education was a component of an egalitarian social transformation of India.

The first Education Commission—the Hunter Commission of 1882—recorded detailed appeals by both Dadabhai Naoroji and Jyotiba Phule calling for four years of universal, state-provided education to improve the lives of the people.

Their appeals had little impact on colonial policy. The gap in years of schooling between India and early leaders such as the US and Germany, which was less than two years in 1870, had widened to 7.8 years by 1950. As late as 1921, only 11 per cent of India’s population was literate. British India had the lowest public expenditure on education in the world between 1860 and 1912. In stark contrast, rulers of Indian States during the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century spent twice as much per capita on education. Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh had already been engaged since 1848 in the radical endeavour of opening education to all—including the oppressed castes and girls; the Maharajas of Kolhapur and Baroda, and the Begums of Bhopal, among others, provided free primary education for all.

By the 1940s, even the colonial administration was compelled to respond to the radicalisation of the freedom movement. The Report of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), “Post-War Plan of Educational Development in India”, declared that a national system of education required that “all children must receive enough education to prepare them to earn a living as well as to fulfil themselves as individuals and discharge their duties as citizens”. It further argued that if there was to be any equality of opportunity, providing facilities for some children and not others was impossible to justify. A national system had to be universal, compulsory, free, and of sufficient duration to secure its fundamental objectives.

The recommendations of the B.G. Kher Committee on “Ways and Means of Financing Educational Development in India” (1950) shaped Article 45 of the Directive Principles, mandating that “the State shall endeavour to provide within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years”.

Gandhi’s alternative and NEP 2020’s silence

Breaking the elitist mould of caste-restricted and colonial education, Gandhi’s proposal of a Nai Talim emphasised that modern educational thought unanimously endorsed educating children through productive work. The social impact of productive work by all children would break down prejudice between manual and intellectual workers, and cultivate a sense of the dignity of labour and of human solidarity.

To secure these advantages, it was essential that the craft or productive work be rich in educative possibilities and extend into the whole curriculum. The objective was not the production of craftsmen. As Gandhi himself clarified: “handicraft has not to be taught merely mechanically . . . but scientifically. That is to say the child should learn the why and wherefore of every process.” The productivity-based methodology inculcated the social values of equality and justice that would become the core of the Indian Constitution. At the Haripura session of the Indian National Congress in 1938, a resolution was adopted that the national system of education would be built on a “wholly new foundation".

NEP 2020 does not even refer to Nai Talim. Instead, it adopts a conservative, prejudicial approach to so-called "vocationalisation". Skilling is treated as a lesser alternative for the children of oppressed castes and classes, who are presumed to need to start earning as quickly as possible. A 2016 amendment to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 now permits even ten-year-olds to participate in labour in “family enterprises". This will reinforce caste-based occupations as children are pushed out of formal academic courses and denied access to wider professional possibilities.

NEP 2020 retreats even from the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE 2009), which through its no-detention policy ensured that children retained their constitutional fundamental right to remain in school until the age of 14. The emphasis on vocational education in NEP 2020, and the restructured 5+3+3+4 structure with three exits located at the elementary stage, will allow exclusion from class III onwards—making NEP 2020 the first policy since Independence to effectively deny formal school education to the vast majority of India’s children from the oppressed and marginalised sections of society. A related initiative aims at selectively making the elementary curriculum itself vocational in targeted “educationally backward” and tribal areas.

Formal book learning, in the meantime, remains reserved for the privileged. For them, exposure to productive labour is celebrated as a “fun course”—a “ten-day bagless period sometimes during Grades 6–8".

The constitutional retreat

How does one account for this reversal from its constitutional moorings? The failure of successive governments to achieve constitutional commitments despite continually reasserting them in policies and reports has undoubtedly contributed to the crisis-ridden state of India’s education system. But these earlier failures must be distinguished from the present policy’s complete volte-face. NEP 2020 has withdrawn from the constitutional goals, values, and responsibilities that the freedom movement placed before the evolving Indian republic—without a democratic national debate, by riding roughshod over the federal rights of the States, and by pushing through policy without meaningful parliamentary scrutiny.

Once the Government of India adopted the Economic Reforms Programme in 1991, the intrusions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund into education policy became more direct and altered the very course and purpose of the education system. The State began to withdraw from its constitutional responsibility. Expanding privatisation, commercialisation, and corporatisation of education promoted the idea that knowledge was a commodity to be traded in the market and made accessible only to those who could afford it. (The Ambani-Birla Report of 2002 represented this thinking in its starkest form.)

NEP 2020 reveals itself as a deliberate market-oriented education policy—a carrier of both historically entrenched exclusions and contemporary neoliberal inequalities. It betrays the promise of the egalitarian alternative elaborated in the conception of independent India as a modern republic, and diverges from the constitutional guarantee of the right to education as a fundamental right.

Policies that followed began proposing a series of missions and abhiyans to impart market-oriented skills beginning with the lowest rung of “functional literacy". The acquisition of practical skills was deemed sufficient to make the mass of citizens "employable".

The most damaging development was the recourse to low-cost, non-formal education (NFE), treated as “equivalent to schooling” for those children who could not “be expected to attend a full day at school". The exclusion from the formal education system of children who EVEN now constitute over 80 per cent of those in the relevant age group was thereby initiated. NFE introduced a policy of multi-track, discriminatory streams of education. “Low-cost” practices began infiltrating the government school system across the country.

Para-teachers, shiksha mitras, and acharyas under Education Guaranteed Schemes were used to cut the costs of trained teachers—particularly after the Fifth Pay Commission. In Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, as in Uttar Pradesh and most other States, recruitment of full-time trained teachers was badly affected, if not halted altogether. Trained teachers, even under RTE Act 2009, were required to perform other duties—census-taking, elections, polio eradication, and disaster management.

By 2003, NFE had spread to 25 States and, with the aid of thousands of voluntary organisations, covered 7.4 million children. It became the most powerful obstacle to the struggle to realise the constitutional directive of education for all.

Segregating the poor and the disadvantaged in institutions catering only to them produced a situation in which the privileged were uncritically regarded as meritorious, while the vast majority of children were denied their fundamental right to education.

Centralisation, privatisation

With regard to higher education, NEP 2020 centralised and concentrated all decision-making power in so-called “independent bodies” that are, in practice, subordinated to the central government—and ultimately the Prime Minister’s Office, which constitutes them. Accreditation, eligibility, evaluation, the right to award degrees, and the right to continue functioning are handed over to these bodies, which have minimal representation from academia. All democratic functioning within institutions is ended. Institutions made “autonomous” by fiat, even as teachers and students lost their autonomy, will be autocratically administered by self-perpetuating Boards of Governors, dominated by investors and financial experts to ensure "efficiency".

The Government of India insists that a single eligibility and entrance procedure will provide a “level playing field” for students across the country. But in a country as socio-historically, academically, and linguistically diverse as India, problems of diversity cannot be ironed out by the imposition of a single examination. Diversity has to be recognised, appreciated, and engaged with—so that the variety of institutions and intellectual traditions evolved over decades are protected and advanced. The concurrent status of education in the Constitution reflects precisely this understanding.

However, the computer-based test with its “objective type” multiple-choice questions is uniformly imposed for admission to all subjects. Academics across the country have raised objections that the multiple-choice method does not allow analytical and discursive skills to be adequately expressed or evaluated. Admissions made on criteria that cannot properly assess intellectual abilities will negatively affect the quality of students entering higher education institutions.

Uniformity of evaluation methods, or reliance on a single National Testing Agency (NTA), cannot guarantee that bias and prejudicial assessments are guarded against. The danger of built-in preconceptions filtering through is in fact heightened because the NTA is not a statutory body but a private entity registered under the Societies Act. Its accountability—as recent events have shown—is nowhere defined, while the inevitable higher costs fall on students.

The introduction of centralised admission procedures will lead to homogenisation of curricula across the country. NEET and CUET have already produced a massive expansion of coaching classes and a flight to private unaided schools with centralised curricula. NEP 2020 promotes the privatisation of education while restricting the growth of state-funded institutions.

Instead of expanding and improving free and compulsory school education, NEP 2020 has driven a merger and closure of government schools—over 1.5 lakh schools already—and the “twinning” of government and private schools. Renaming the Public-Private Partnership as a “Public Philanthropic Partnership” has opened the education system to private capital and corporate interests.

NEP 2020 claims to have drawn the concept of the “School Complex” from the Kothari Commission’s Report, and credits itself with implementing what earlier policies failed to do. But the Commission’s basic unit was the common neighbourhood school, with only small clusters of nearby schools recommended for meaningful interaction. NEP 2020’s school complex, by contrast, extends over 10 to 15 kilometres—a formidable distance for elementary school children to cover daily, and one that will increase the number of children who drop out.

In 2019-20, only 36.3 per cent of higher secondary students were enrolled in government schools, while 40.7 per cent were in private unaided schools. Higher education has seen a large increase in enrolment in private professional institutions. The overall increase in undergraduate enrolment slowed from 13.7 per cent between 2012-13 and 2014-15 to 12.8 per cent between 2014-15 and 2019-20. Children from the poorer, marginalised, and oppressed sections cannot access higher education as the state-funded sector shrinks, and they cannot access private colleges either.

Denial of reservation

NEP 2020 has talked of the importance of teacher training, yet it welcomes volunteers, social workers, counsellors, locally eminent persons, school alumni, senior citizens, and "public-spirited community members” to enter the school system from early childhood care and education through to class XII—in undefined roles and without meeting any academic eligibility requirements. (NEP: 2.7; 3.7.) Opening the gates to volunteer cadres from “like-minded” organisations, which will invariably be patronised by the parent organisation of the present ruling party, makes a mockery of a scientific and evidence-based system of knowledge.

NEP 2020 repeatedly invokes “merit alone” as the basis on which its accreditation, eligibility, and assessment mechanisms operate. SC/ST/OBC students, religious minorities, women, and persons with disabilities—who have direct experience of oppression and are shaped by histories of deprivation and discrimination—are expected to achieve the same “learning outcomes” as those from backgrounds of privilege. How is that either possible or even desirable? “Merit alone” denies agency to the socially and educationally marginalised. A competitive, market-oriented concept of merit can only reinforce the hold of the privileged and strengthen existing inequalities. Not surprisingly, NEP 2020 undermines the principle of reservation that the Constitution provides for those who have been, and continue to be, systematically discriminated against.

The digital illusion

Requirements for schools “will be made less restrictive,” with “less emphasis on input and greater emphasis on output” in order to create space for NGOs and religious bodies to set up “alternate” schools and even Boards. (NEP: 3.6.) On top of this alternative architecture, NEP 2020 has placed a technological claim: online education as a “crucial component” of the mainstream system. “Blended learning” is the prevailing buzzword in governmental circles.

NEP 2020 used the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to embrace and promote this option. Starting with a proposal that roughly 20 per cent of curricula would be covered through online modes, the Union government’s implementation has pushed that figure toward 50 per cent. This will gradually transfer the entire financial burden to the individual student and her family as the government retreats from education to make room for IT corporates.

This retreat shows no concern for the pedagogical limitations of online learning. Still less does it address the enormous exclusion that would follow—given that only 8 per cent of households with children aged 5 to 24 have access to both a digital device and internet connectivity, and 37 per cent of households have only a single-room dwelling.

This anti-constitutional and unjust arrangement has gained credibility because, under neoliberal principles, not only labour, goods, and services but all human activities—including culture, social relationships, and institutions—become commodities. Learning, redefined as a “private good”; knowledge, recast as a “commodity”; and education, marketed as a “service”—all are to be bought and sold. Those who pay more may expect higher returns.

The National Sample Survey Organisation’s most recent survey on education (71st round) captures the scale of exclusion already under way. Only 6 per cent of young people from the bottom fifth of the population attend educational levels above higher secondary. Fewer than 10 per cent of SC/ST/OBC students and minorities, especially Muslims, complete class XII and become eligible for reservation quotas.

A national system of education must be transformational and emancipatory. The real challenge for any education system is to transform a heterogeneous and diverse population into a rich learning community—one shaped by critical self-questioning rather than conformism and prejudice. This cannot be left to the market, where profit rules and private players respond accordingly. NEP 2020’s repeated declarations in favour of “one nation, one tradition, one pedagogical methodology, and one digital platform” run counter to the diversity of India’s peoples, languages, and socio-cultural histories.

Once the democratic space for rights has been de-legitimised, existing sites and modes of peaceful democratic debate, dissent, and resistance are turned into “anti-national” acts. In a democracy such as that provided for in India’s Constitution, liberties and rights are enabling conditions in an ongoing politics of democratically negotiated nationhood. In this continuing struggle, education—from the pre-primary stage through to higher education—has an especially significant role to play.

Madhu Prasad is a founder member and national spokesperson of the All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE).

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