Let us Collectively Accord Education Highest Importance and Provide Public Schools With the Best Infrastructure

The cause, and where I stand

Let me begin with a clarification I should not have to make, but must. My support for the school-improvement movement initiated by the CJP is genuine — and it is support for a cause, not a party. I am strictly apolitical. When I amplify this cause, some assume I am anti-BJP or anti-ruling party. I am neither; that is never my starting point. I revolve around causes and hope to see them accomplished. Some in power may overlook them; some outside, with clear thinking, will identify them — and people doing the right thing at the right time deserve backing, whoever they are. It is coincidence that I have backed two CJP causes in two months: first the fight against paper leaks, which is rational and urgent, and now the fight for schools, which is personal to me. Beyond that I carry no affiliation and no agenda. When the cause is primary, politics are secondary — and for me politics will always be secondary, because a country that takes sides before it takes stock never speaks the truth.

Sixteen years in the staff room

I never studied in a government school, but I have served them as a teaching volunteer for sixteen years. My education in this subject began in 2010, when a headmaster — the head of a large public school — listed his school's material and infrastructure gaps to me, a young volunteer who could teach but had no money to give, and asked for help. I felt the wrongness of that moment deeply, and I have watched it repeat for a decade and a half. Government schools in this country survive on the kindness of passers-by: if a donor appears, a fan appears; if none does, the children sweat. There is no standard, no framework, no policy that says what every government school must minimally be — only random donations and public funds released once in a decade. The institution that should stand as the finest monument in every village has had its existence relegated to chance rather than choice.

And so we arrive at the absurdity I cannot make peace with. We fly in gleaming airports, ride Vande Bharats, build bullet trains, drive on world-class expressways, and stream on 5G in the remotest tehsil — and justify none of it to the child in the ultra-poor public school down the road. I recently visited a village with a modern panchayat building, a magnificent temple and visibly prosperous households — and, amid all of it, a below-ordinary school with outdated everything, where two hundred children study. When richness surrounds a bare-minimum school, the finger points at one thing only: missing priorities. First build a great school — for the kids, for the future — then move to the other necessities. A country aiming to be developed in twenty years has this exactly backwards. I have flown and known comfort these past four years; the campaign launched this Independence Day struck a chord precisely because of that. If we are living among the stars and cannot lift the most basic part of our own country, we are not living right.

From conviction to arithmetic

Causes win when their numbers are simple, so here are ours. India has about 10.2 lakh government schools. Andhra Pradesh's Nadu-Nedu — the best proof of concept in the country — delivered complete facelifts, from running water and working toilets to furniture, fans, paint, compound walls and kitchen sheds, at roughly ₹25–35 lakh per school, executed through parents' committees. Apply that benchmark nationally, and transforming the physical state of every government school in India costs about ₹3.5 lakh crore over five years — roughly ₹70,000 crore a year. Add about ₹30,000 crore annually for the human and digital side — phased recruitment against the ten lakh vacant teacher posts, training, and computers-plus-internet for the five lakh unconnected schools — and the complete national mission costs about ₹1 lakh crore a year for five years.

Can we safely afford it? Easily — and this deserves repetition in every forum. India currently spends about 2.9% of GDP on education, Centre and states combined, against the 6% promised since the Kothari Commission of 1966. The mission above adds roughly 0.3% of GDP a year. We would still remain far below the 6% goal. For perspective, ₹1 lakh crore a year is less than half the annual free-foodgrain bill, about the cost of one bullet-train corridor, and a rounding error beside a ₹45-lakh-crore Union budget. A nation of 1.4 billion living gods can spend one-third of one percent of its income so that every child sits in a school with light, water and a teacher. The constraint was never money. It is priority — and priority is exactly what a movement supplies.

A standard, so it is choice, not chance

What I have witnessed for sixteen years — headmasters as fundraisers, schools as charity cases — ends only one way: with a written national minimum standard. Call it the School Standard Code: every government school, by law, must have functional power, safe drinking water, usable toilets for girls, boys and disabled children, furniture for every child, a boundary wall, a library, internet, a playground, and at least one teacher per class. Publish it. Audit every school against it annually — by parents, in public, on a dashboard anyone can check. The fitness of a road and the safety of an aircraft are governed by standards, inspections and consequences; the schooling of a child deserves nothing less.

Implementation, step by practical step

Year one: a national survey of every school against the Code, and the funds locked into a non-lapsable five-year corpus — the way road cess built highways — so allocations never sleep unspent, as half of some states' education budgets do today. Years one to three: works executed through parents' committees on the Nadu-Nedu model — community hands, local contractors, before-and-after photographs on the public record. Years two to four: teacher recruitment state by state, single-teacher schools first, secondary maths, science and English next. Alongside, throw open the citizen channels: CSR and diaspora adopt-a-school programmes with named schools and published outcomes, so every volunteer, NRI and retired teacher can find their school — and their credit. And insulate the whole mission with an all-party resolution making the five-year plan irreversible across governments, because the cause is primary and politics secondary.

Conclusion: smaller than a mountain

For sixteen years I have stood in staff rooms hearing requests — a fan, a door, a second teacher — that a great nation should be ashamed to hear twice. What is proposed here is not utopia. It is 0.3% of GDP, a written standard, parents with checklists, and five monsoons of honest work. This country has moved mountains in five-year spans before — highways, vaccines, digital payments that the world now studies. A school is smaller than a mountain. I sincerely urge everyone reading this to join the cause, and I urge those in power to subscribe fully to its premise: devise the standard, fund the plan, and let the grassroots execute it with you. If we do, we will live among the best schools in our own lifetime — monuments at the centre of every village, built by all of us, in service of the living gods who sit in them.