By Faizaan Bhat
In a government primary school in rural Rajasthan, ask fifth-graders to subtract two three-digit numbers. The ASER 2022 report found that only 17.3 percent could get the answer right.
The classroom will be full, the register will show near-universal enrollment, and the children will have uniforms, textbooks, and a midday meal.
What they will not have, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is the arithmetic a ten-year-old is supposed to know.
This is the difference that lies underneath most discussions about Indian education: schooling has spread with astonishing speed, while learning has stayed behind.
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, passed by the UPA-II government in August 2009 and effective from April 2010, promised free schooling to children between six and fourteen. Political parties of all colours put quality education somewhere in their manifestos.
The disparity between that promise and the classroom in Rajasthan is the shape of the system itself, rather than an accident of implementation.
Consider what happens once a family has money.
English-medium schools, private tutors, computers, internet access, and parents who themselves went to college are not neutral advantages.
They are, as the sociologist Geetha Nambissan has argued, the cultural and economic capital that decides who succeeds in an education system that now prizes English, mathematics and science above almost everything else.
A household with these resources can build much of a child’s educational advantage through private spending, while the state largely steps in to certify the outcome.
The coaching town of Kota makes this visible on an industrial scale.
Hundreds of thousands of students move there or study through its franchises, drilling for the JEE and similar entrance examinations, competing for a small number of seats in elite engineering and medical colleges.
Vishal Vasanthakumar, in his book The Smart and the Dumb: The Politics of Education in India, describes this scramble as a credential race rather than a contest of ability.
The word merit gets attached to whoever wins, but what the word hides is the years of private investment behind the winning score.
Two students may sit the same examination and answer the same questions under the same rules.
One grew up with an educated mother, a tutor from age eight, a laptop and a coaching fee the family could afford without strain. The other is the first in the family to finish school, taught in a language that is not the language of the exam, without access to any of the paid scaffolding that the first student took as ordinary.
The paper does not know the difference. The result looks fair, but the conditions that produced the result were not.
None of this is new. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education and Wood’s Despatch of 1854 built an educational hierarchy around English and European knowledge, pushing indigenous learning to the margins even as they opened new institutional doors.
Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule understood, decades before independence, that literacy and schooling were political weapons, and used them to challenge caste and gender oppression directly.
After independence, the Kothari Commission of 1964-66 saw the danger clearly and proposed a Common School System, in which children of different backgrounds would sit in the same classrooms.
India built a different system: elite private schools, ordinary private schools, government schools, coaching centres and selective universities, each driven by fee and location, leaving a child’s future closely tied to the household into which she is born.
The Sachar Committee’s findings on Muslim education point to the same failure from a different direction: deprivation in access and quality that no single cause explains, because caste, class, geography and discrimination interact rather than operate alone.
Textbook debates over the historical figures celebrated, the communities represented and the version of the past taught reveal another divide: education remains unequal in outcome and contested in content.
An exam-driven system trains students to memorise rather than question, which weakens the one function education is supposed to serve above all others: teaching a citizen to examine the society she lives in.
India has multiplied its schools and multiplied its coaching centres alongside them. What it has not multiplied is the chance, for a child born poor, to meet a child born rich on genuinely equal ground.
The country did not fail to build schools. It built a sorting machine and called it opportunity.
- The author is an independent researcher based in Jammu, with contributions to several regional and national media platforms. He can be reached at [email protected].