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An Indian Educational Decade Like No Other: Looking Beyond the Setbacks and Bolstering the Progress, Reform Trajectory

Nations, like people, are tempted to judge themselves by their worst week. In late July 2026, Indian education had one. The NEET-UG paper leak, the cancelled exam, the protests at Jantar Mantar, a hunger strike that moved the country, and finally the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25 — with Pralhad Joshi assigned additional charge of the ministry — made for the kind of headlines that tempt a nation to conclude its education system is broken. It is the wrong conclusion. A leak is a wound; it is not the body. And the body — built over twelve years of expansion, reform and rising global standing — is stronger than at any point in independent India's history. The task now is not to pull back in disappointment but to build forward on evidence. The evidence is considerable. The spine: a policy thirty-four years overdue Start with the National Education Policy 2020, the first comprehensive rewrite of India's education framework since 1986. It replac...
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Wellfare Through Investing in Mothers of School Students: Why Andhra Pradesh's Quiet Experiment in Educational Socialism Could be a Model for India

Every year, as   a new academic   session begins, the   Andhra Pradesh government   deposits   ₹15,000 into the bank account of the mother of every eligible school-going child   under its flagship   education support programme,   Thalliki Vandanam . The assistance is   intended to help   families meet the   recurring costs of   education—uniforms, shoes, textbooks, notebooks,   school bags, transport, examination fees and   other expenses that   often force poor   households to borrow   or even withdraw   children from school. Unlike many welfare   schemes that restrict   benefits to one   child in a   family,   Thalliki Vandanam extends support for every eligible child studying from Class I to Class XII in recognised government, aided and private schools.   This year alone, the programme is   expected to benefit  ...
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Young India's Employment Problem: 45 Million Educated People Missing from the Workforce

In Sonepat, Haryana, thirty-five postgraduates — MBAs and engineers among them — once lined up to apply for two posts of peon. In Chhattisgarh, seventy-five thousand people applied for thirty peon vacancies; the embarrassed administration cancelled the recruitment altogether. When Uttar Pradesh Police advertised sixty-two messenger posts — a job whose formal requirement was Class 5 and the ability to ride a bicycle — the applicants included tens of thousands of graduates, thousands of postgraduates and, famously, thousands of PhD holders. And when the Railways opened about 63,000 Group D vacancies requiring a Class 10 pass, nearly two crore Indians applied — among them over four lakh B.Tech engineers and forty thousand with postgraduate engineering degrees. Somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, a science graduate spent four years working as a court peon "out of compulsion," rising before dawn to prepare for the SSC exam that might one day let his degree mean something. These are not ...
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