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 replaced the rigid 10+2 structure with a 5+3+3+4 design that formally brings early childhood education into the school system; it reimagined higher education around flexibility — four-year undergraduate degrees, multiple entry and exit, credits that travel with the student. And unlike many Indian policies, it did not remain a document. New NCERT textbooks aligned to the 2023 curriculum framework reached Classes 1–8 by the 2025-26 session. The National Credit Framework, notified in 2023, created a single ladder connecting school, college, vocational and experiential learning. Its digital backbone is already at population scale: over 26 crore APAAR academic IDs generated and more than 110 crore academic records uploaded by mid-2026. Over a hundred universities run the four-year degree. This is reform as infrastructure — quiet, cumulative, hard to reverse.

The bricks: an institutional build-out without precedent

The physical expansion is the most tangible legacy. Medical education tells it best: medical colleges rose from 387 to 819 in eleven years — more than doubling — while MBBS seats grew from 51,000 to 1.29 lakh and postgraduate seats from 31,000 to 78,000, with 75,000 more seats promised over five years. AIIMS institutions tripled from 7 to 23. IITs grew from 16 to 23, IIMs from 13 to around 21. For the first time, the traffic began flowing both ways across borders: IIT Madras opened in Zanzibar, IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi, IIM Ahmedabad in Dubai — Indian institutional brands exported — while Deakin and Wollongong opened at GIFT City and the University of Southampton opened India's first mainland foreign-university campus in Gurugram. A country that once sent its students abroad by default is becoming a destination and an exporter of education simultaneously.

The people: access widening, women leading

Buildings matter only if students fill them. They have. Higher-education enrolment reached 4.5 crore in 2023-24, up 31.5% from 3.42 crore in 2014-15; the Gross Enrolment Ratio climbed from 23.7 to 30. The most consequential shift is gendered: female enrolment surged 42% to 2.24 crore, female GER (31.2) has now exceeded male GER for seven consecutive years, and women's share of STEM enrolment rose from 38.4% to 44%. Whatever else is said about this decade, it will be remembered as the one in which the Indian college classroom became, statistically, a woman's place as much as a man's. Beneath higher education, the schooling base widened too: 85 new Kendriya Vidyalayas and 28 Navodaya Vidyalayas approved in one Cabinet decision, over 12,000 schools selected under the ₹27,360-crore PM SHRI programme as NEP model schools, and the ULLAS literacy mission registering 2.2 crore adult learners — with Ladakh declared fully literate in 2024.

The money and the mind: budgets and innovation

Funding followed. For perspective, the last pre-2014 budget (2013-14) provided ₹79,451 crore as the Centre's contribution to education — ₹52,701 crore for school education and ₹26,750 crore for higher education, amounting to roughly 0.7% of GDP as central spend. From that baseline, the education ministry's allocation touched a record ₹1.29 lakh crore in 2025-26 and rose again to ₹1.39 lakh crore for 2026-27 — the highest ever in absolute terms, with school education receiving its largest-ever outlay, alongside new funding channels that did not exist a decade ago, such as HEFA infrastructure loans for premier institutions and the ₹50,000-crore research foundation. Honesty requires the caveat: combined centre-state spending still sits below the NEP's 6%-of-GDP goal, and independent analyses note that education's share of the total Union budget has not kept pace with the ministry's absolute growth — closing that gap is the unfinished business. But the returns on what has been invested are visible in the innovation data, which is perhaps the decade's most objective external scorecard. India climbed from 81st on the Global Innovation Index in 2015 to 39th in 2024 — among the fastest rises anywhere. Patent filings went from 42,763 in 2014-15 to over 1.1 lakh in 2024-25, the fastest growth among the world's top twenty patent origins. Ten thousand Atal Tinkering Labs put prototyping tools in front of 1.1 crore schoolchildren, with 50,000 more announced. The ₹50,000-crore Anusandhan National Research Foundation now anchors research funding, and the One Nation One Subscription scheme handed 1.8 crore students access to the world's journals. In the rankings that universities compete on, India's QS-listed institutions grew from 11 in 2015 to 54 in 2026 — the fourth-largest national contingent on earth, and the fastest-rising in the G20.

The hands and the screens: skills and digital reach

The decade also widened the definition of education beyond degrees. Over 1.6 crore youth trained under PMKVY; a ₹60,000-crore programme launched to modernise a thousand ITIs on a hub-and-spoke model; vocational credits woven into the mainstream through the credit framework. Digitally, DIKSHA crossed 150 crore learning sessions in 36 languages, PM eVIDYA's 200 DTH channels reached students beyond the internet's edge, SWAYAM put a thousand-plus credit-bearing courses online, and the IndiaAI mission with its AI Centres of Excellence pointed the system at the technology that will define the next decade.

The real repair: exams that never leak, ever

Against this ledger, how should the events of July 2026 be read? Not as a story about one exam, one leak, or one minister. The NEET episode was only the loudest instance of a much older and wider disease. Investigations by national dailies have documented dozens upon dozens of question-paper leaks over the past several years — by some counts more than a hundred across central and state recruitment and entrance examinations — cancelling exams from teacher-eligibility tests to police constable recruitments and, cumulatively, disrupting the plans of crores of applicants. Every one of those leaks carried the same betrayal at different scales: a young person who prepared honestly, defeated not by a better candidate but by a stolen paper.

This is the standard the system must now hold itself to — not fewer leaks, but none. An examination exists for exactly one purpose: to identify the best candidates fairly and let them fulfil their educational ambitions. The moment a paper can be bought, the exam stops rewarding preparation and starts rewarding proximity to crime; merit becomes a lottery and honesty a handicap. No education system, however many institutions it builds, can retain credibility while the gateways to those institutions stay porous.

The good news is that the repair architecture exists and is finally being assembled. The Public Examinations Act of 2024 criminalised organised cheating with serious penalties — it now needs its first convictions to become a real deterrent. The Radhakrishnan committee's blueprint is being implemented, and NEET-UG will shift from the leak-prone OMR format to secure computer-based testing from 2027 — eliminating the printing, transport and storage stages where nearly every major leak has originated — paired with biometric authentication and a restructured NTA. The same discipline must extend beyond NEET to every examination that decides a young Indian's future: state PSCs, teacher tests, railway and police recruitments, university entrances. Encrypted digital delivery, government-controlled centres, accountable custody chains, swift prosecution and published post-mortems of every breach — applied uniformly, not selectively. Accountability was visibly delivered in July, and Pradhan's parting words carried the right spirit: that India's youth must not be trapped in a cycle of confusion. The way to honour that is a national zero-leak standard, treated with the seriousness of aviation safety — where a single failure triggers systemic redesign, because a single failure is one too many.

Build on it, don't back off it

The temptation after a public failure is retrenchment: slow the reforms, distrust the institutions, relitigate the direction. The evidence argues the opposite. A doubled medical-college network, a tripled AIIMS map, a thirty-point innovation-index climb, a feminised college classroom, a credit system with a quarter-billion IDs — these are not talking points; they are load-bearing structures, and structures are for building upon. The agenda ahead writes itself: make every examination in the country leak-proof — starting with a clean CBT NEET in 2027 and extending the same security to the hundred-odd exams that have failed young Indians in recent years; close the quality gap behind the access gains — faculty depth, research output, employability; fund the 6% commitment with a time-bound path; and prosecute exam crime until the deterrent is real. India's demographic dividend gives it a narrow window in which education is destiny. The last twelve years built the widest educational base this country has ever had; the gateways to it must now be made as strong as the base itself. The answer to broken exams is not a smaller ambition. It is an unbreakable lock on every door — so that the best candidates, and only merit, decide who walks through.