The introduction of the high-profile National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, has hidden the reality of a government that is profoundly indifferent to the education of India’s children and youth. The Union Government’s track record over the last decade has convincingly demonstrated that in education, it is concerned only with the successful implementation of three core agenda items — the centralisation of power with the Union Government; the commercialisation and outsourcing of investments in education to the private sector, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions.
Brazen centralisation
Unchecked centralisation has been the hallmark of this Government’s functioning over the last 11 years, but its most damaging consequences have been in the domain of education. The Central Advisory Board of Education, comprising Ministers for Education in both the Union and State Governments, has not been convened since September 2019. Even while adopting and implementing a paradigm shift in education through the NEP 2020, the Union Government has not seen fit to consult State governments on the implementation of these policies even once. It is a testament to the Government’s singular determination not to heed any voice other than its own, even on a subject that is squarely in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution.
The lack of dialogue is accompanied by a ‘bullying tendency’. Among the most disgraceful acts committed by this Government is the coercion of State governments to implement the PM-SHRI (or PM Schools for Rising India) scheme of model schools by withholding the grants due to them under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) as leverage.
These funds have been due to States for years as part of the financial support required to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, which came into force in 2010. These actions betray the motivations of a government that cares more about posturing and pursuing publicity than upholding the constitutionally guaranteed Right to Education. It is a flagrant violation of constitutional morality and in its 363rd Report, even the bipartisan Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports, has called for the unconditional release of the SSA funds to State governments.
In higher education, the Government has brought in the draconian draft University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines of 2025 which have fully written out State governments from the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in universities established, funded, and operated by them. The Union Government has given itself — through the Governors who are typically designated as the Chancellor of the University — near-monopoly power in the selection of the Vice-Chancellors in State universities. This is a backdoor attempt to convert a subject in the Concurrent List into the sole preserve of the Union Government and represents one of the gravest threats to federalism in today’s times.
The issue of commercialisation
The Narendra Modi government’s commercialisation of the education system has been happening in plain sight, in full compliance with the NEP.
As a constitutional guarantee for primary school education, the RTE provided key safeguards to ensure the accessibility of primary schools for all Indian children — a lower primary school (Classes I-V) within one kilometre of every neighbourhood, and an upper primary school (Classes VI-VIII) within three kilometres of every neighbourhood. The NEP, which generally omits to mention the RTE, seeks to overturn the concept of these neighbourhood schools by introducing school complexes. Couched in this language of school complexes is the large-scale shutdown of public schooling and unchecked privatisation of school education. Since 2014, we have seen the closure and consolidation of 89,441 public schools across the country — and the establishment of 42,944 additional private schools. The country’s poor have been forced out of public education, and into the hands of a prohibitively expensive and under-regulated private school system.
In higher education, the Union Government has introduced the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) as a replacement to the University Grants Commission’s erstwhile system of block-grants. Universities are being encouraged to seek loans, offered at market rates of interest, from HEFA, which they are then obliged to repay from their own revenues. In its 364th Report on the Demand for Grants, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education found that between 78% to 100% of these loans are being repaid by universities through student fees. In other words, the price of the Government’s retreat from financing public education has been borne by students facing fee hikes.
The increasing prevalence of corruption in our education systems is, similarly, a manifestation of this commercialisation. From the bribery scandal in the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) to the tragically inept National Testing Agency (NTA), public education systems and agencies are increasingly under the spotlight for financial malfeasance. This growing venality and cynicism in our public education system is linked to the Government-sponsored politicisation and commercialisation of education.
There is a communalisation
The Union Government’s third thrust is on communalisation — the fulfilment of the long-standing ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, of indoctrinating and cultivating hatred through the education system.
Textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the backbone of the school curriculum, have been revised with the intention of sanitising Indian history. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the sections on Mughal India have been dropped from curricula. In addition, the Preamble to the Indian Constitution was dropped from textbooks, until public backlash forced the Government to commit to mandatory inclusion once again.
In our universities, we have seen the large-scale hiring of professors from regime-friendly ideologically backgrounds, no matter the comically poor quality of their teaching and scholarships. Leadership positions in key institutions — even in the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru so evocatively described as the temples of modern India — have been reserved for pliant ideologues. The UGC’s ongoing attempts to dilute the qualifications for professorships and vice-chancellorships are only the latest ploy intended to enable the influx of educationists who are driven by ideological considerations rather than academic ideals.
Over the last decade, our education systems have been systematically cleansed of the spirit of public service and education policy has been sanitised of any concerns about access to and the quality of education.
The consequences of this single-minded push for centralisation, commercialisation, and communalisation have fallen squarely on our students. This carnage of India’s public education system must end.
Sonia Gandhi is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) and the Chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party
Published – March 31, 2025 12:16 am IST