Over the last four decades, education has followed a zigzag track. Regional differences and sharp shifts in assumptions about the state’s role in education mark the journey. When viewed from a longer perspective that has shaped expectations after Independence, the current state of the system may not inspire confidence.

The dramatic events of the mid-1980s formed the backdrop for a major initiative taken at that time to determine the future of education. The first speech made by Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister contained new ideas that were to find a place in the forthcoming national policy. One of these ideas was that every district should have at least one school with high standards.

After the 1986 national policy was announced, the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, as the new schools were called, seemed to offer a vision of equality based on competition at the age of 11. Critics wondered whether it was a political gesture aimed at rural elites.

Tamil Nadu and West Bengal did not want a school set up by the Central government. They saw it as the Centre’s attempt to encroach on what they regarded was the State’s prerogative. Suspicion of this kind was not new; an amendment to the Constitution made during the Emergency a decade earlier had made education a concurrent responsibility, shifting it from the State list. Concurrent practices began in the mid-1980s, but the process was so modest that no one could guess how far things would go and through what means.

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The 1986 national policy did provide several suggestions for calibrated means to practise concurrency. While established mechanisms such as the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) continued to operate, a new mechanism—the National Curriculum Framework (NCF)—was introduced. It aimed to become a means to build consensus around familiar curricular conflicts and reforms. The effort proved valuable for a while, but now—in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century—the consensus achieved earlier on several issues is coming apart. Between centralised control and regional assertions, the system is struggling to find a middle ground.

A window opens briefly

The journey from the mid-1980s to the present was neither straight nor smooth. Resistance to policies emanating from the dominant economic ideology of neoliberalism took various forms and accomplished its diverse goals in different measures. A window for resistance opened somewhat wide when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) unexpectedly won the parliamentary election in 2004.

The first phase of this regime enabled institutions such as the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to recover the ground lost in school curriculum and textbooks under the preceding National Democratic Alliance (NDA) rule. A new NCF was drafted, followed by syllabi and textbooks that marked a major departure in pedagogic terms. Many State governments, including Tamil Nadu, modified their own syllabi and textbooks in the light of the new NCF.

The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) mutated into a veritable social movement in several parts of the country. In Uttar Pradesh, where no one expected cultural energy to lead a state programme, the involvement of Mahila Samakhya led the Kasturba Gandhi schools for girls from marginalised social groups to stunning success. This wave of determined progress towards gender equity was crowned by the passage of the Right To Education (RTE) Act in Parliament in 2010. It kindled grand hopes of substantial change in the social character of secondary and higher education, but these hopes proved premature.

The process of central funds reaching the States for elementary education was affected by the dismantling of the Planning Commission and changes in funding procedures for flagship programmes like the SSA. Funding for RTE implementation slowed down. So did the momentum of schemes like the Kasturba Gandhi schools.

Children looking outside from their classroom at Laggere Government School in Bengaluru on June 14, 2024.
| Photo Credit:
SUDHAKARA JAIN

The revival of district-level teacher-training institutions and several other initiatives made under the SSA were aborted in several States. Teacher training was, in any case, heavily privatised—a catastrophic phenomenon to which the Supreme Court responded by setting up a Commission under Justice J.S. Verma. The commission’s recommendations initially made some impact, but later dissolved into the general din of a new policy.

Demonetisation and the shift to goods and services tax (GST) provoked significant erosion in the unorganised sector, resulting in unemployment and marginalisation on an unprecedented scale. The situation worsened due to the sudden lockdown at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of urban workers returned to their villages with their children. Village schools were totally unprepared to receive them. The decline in parental capacity to keep children, particularly girls, in school became fully visible during and after the pandemic.

Higher education

The picture of higher education presents a reality that looks similar to that of school education, but it is, in fact, quite different, and the route it has taken to the present scenario over the last four decades is also different. Privatisation had already set in during the 1970s in professional fields like medicine and engineering. What had begun as a capitation-fee model mutated into a full-scale privatised system of higher education by the turn of the century. The Programme of Action (POA), which came six years after the NEP, indicated this route, and many observers had anticipated a steep decline in state funding of higher education. But the Birla-Ambani report (2000) opened the doors for private capital in a way that did not seem probable in the early 1990s.

As the new century advanced, the number of fully private universities increased at a great pace. Set up with the approval of State legislatures, they were aware from the start that no central regulator would bother them with the norms and procedures under which public universities function. It was not going to be a level playing field, not even nominally. Neither in their fee structure, nor in the admission of students and selection of faculty were private universities obliged to follow norms like reservation and minimum eligibility prescribed by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

Their approval came through a clause that was originally meant for institutions inspired by idealistic experimentation. This clause enabled the UGC to include them in the category of “deemed” universities. The clause came in handy for letting in a motley group of private universities and their degrees—mostly in engineering and related areas, with some in the so-called “liberal arts”.

The Indian degree bazaar was already saturated with a vast variety of eligibility ware. Devaluation of degrees and diplomas had set in a while ago with correspondence courses that mutated into online learning. Proliferation of privately run commercial institutions turned the “diploma disease”—a term coined by the economist Ronald Dore—into a full-blown epidemic.

Some of the degrees and diplomas on sale had foreign collaborators. They fetched higher prices—to be paid by parents lacking much knowledge of what they were paying for. State policy called all such degree courses “self-financing”, mimicking the West where students work in order to pay for their education.

Mimicking the West, especially the US, is now centre stage in policy and practice. In the current decade, all central universities have switched over—not out of their own wisdom, but as an act of compliance with orders—to the four-year undergraduate American model. The curriculum features a conspicuous absence of substance—in both academic and vocational courses.

The latter have been inserted in the name of “job readiness”—the new slogan under which India is “skilling” its youth even as massive de-skilling is under way in several sectors of the economy under the auspices of automation. Stray voices continue to question this shift to a mixed undergraduate programme, after teacher organisations succumbed to exhaustion following years of protest.

The story of reforms in higher education is one of marginalisation of teachers. Since the late 1990s, the staff strength of most universities and colleges has steadily dwindled as a result of delays in filling up vacancies. Subsequently, the delay turned into a tacit policy under which institutions took recourse to appointing ad hoc or contractual teachers or asking doctoral students to take classes. Ultimately, when fresh appointments were formally permitted, the backlog had grown so great that hundreds applied for each post. Technical criteria became a legitimate basis for settling eligibility. Ideological considerations and, in many cases, secret extensions of favour became the norm.

A student aspiring to study in the United States seeking information at one of the stalls of the USIEF-Education USA University Fair 2016 in Coimbatore on September 25, 2016.
| Photo Credit:
PERIASAMY M

Bureaucratisation, mixed with a market vision, characterised the beginning of accreditation. An agency called NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council) was set up in 1994 to evaluate the performance of universities and colleges across the country. This exercise was consistent with the neoliberal perspective on quality.

It meant that just as hotels are given stars, universities too could be given grades on the basis of inspection. Initially a bit slow, the idea gained currency within a few years. Private institutions were keen to secure high grades in order to attract students, and inspection teams were pleased to serve this need.

The idea that competition among institutions would improve quality eroded what little intrinsic energy was left in academic institutional life for the silent pursuit of scholarship and pedagogic authenticity. The advocacy of such an approach by the Yash Pal committee was quietly ignored. New regulatory norms also absorbed the ethic of self-marketing.

Websites became the venue where colleges and universities advertised their infrastructure and the qualifications of their faculty. Many used TV and newspapers to advertise their wherewithal. Digital technology ushered in the era of commoditisation of teaching and knowledge.

COVID interlude

During the COVID lockdown and its aftermath, the system of education went through further mechanisation at all levels. Teaching as well as examinations went online. When the Union government’s new education policy was announced in the middle of the pandemic, no one was surprised by its support for the maximum use of technology. Changes in the curriculum were already under way.

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At the school level, COVID restrictions enabled the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to announce major cuts in the senior secondary school syllabus. These slashes paved the way for ideologically inspired changes in textbooks. In higher education too, significant changes in course content marked the advent of political correctness and the loss of academic autonomy. Several State governments took an adversarial stance towards the new policy framework, reminding the public that no consensus had been built before its implementation.

In the history of education since Independence, the current scenario has no precedent. The polarity prevailing in every aspect of governance and society has seeped into education as well. The mainstream system is severely compromised, even as the coaching industry flourishes.

An exodus to foreign universities is rampant in all areas of knowledge. It is a testimony to the disappearance of the goal of self-reliance that the system of education had pursued during the first three decades of Independence.

Krishna Kumar is a former Director of NCERT. His latest book is Thank You, Gandhi.