Explore India’s education policy evolution, quality gaps, and the unfulfilled vision of quality learning in a free-market economy
Satya Narayan Misra
Though a mystic at heart, Tagore was resolutely of this world, had a passion for education, and took profound pride in India. He travelled across the world after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Everywhere he went, he interviewed educators, visited schools, and studied textbooks and reading material. He wrote a letter from Moscow in September 1930 in which he expressed his conviction that “education is the ideal path for solving all our problems”. He noted that Russia’s success was not merely in the numbers being educated, but in its thoroughness and intensity.
He added Japan to his list of successes and wrote in October 1930, while sailing over the Atlantic, “In my view, the imposing tower of misery that rests today on the hearts of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, precarious economic conditions all centre on this single factor.” While India has come a long way in terms of universal access to school education and reducing gender discrimination, the quality dimension, which Tagore had noted during his stay in the USSR, remains an unfinished song, a troubled script, despite our massive leap in economic progress in free-market India.
Education Policy Over the Years
The Radhakrishnan Committee in 1948 recommended creating the UGC to coordinate standards in universities without political interference. The Kothari Committee (1966) placed emphasis on Science & Technology and allocating 6% of GDP to education. The NPE 1986 placed emphasis on increased access for girls and SC/ST students.
As India embraced a free-market economy in 1991, it was during the tenure of Mr. Vajpayee that Kumar Mangalam Birla and Mukesh Ambani gave a report to the government in 2000. The thrust was to outsource higher education in the fields of Science, Technology, Management, and Finance to the private sector; open higher education to private and foreign universities through FDI; increase tuition fees; upgrade ITIs; and increase enrolment to 75% in higher secondary education by 2015.
The report did not carry muster, as the proposals would make higher education less accessible to economically disadvantaged students. The Supreme Court judgment in Prof. Yashpal vs. State of Chhattisgarh in 2005 was a body blow to the proliferation of fly-by-night private universities, by stipulating that the executive notification of 2002 violated the Centre’s exclusive authority to “coordinate and determine standards of higher education” under Item 66 of the Union List of the Constitution. The Court, in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation judgment (2002), ruled that commercialisation and profiteering in education is illegal. The NEP 2020 tries to eschew the pro-corporate approach of Birla and Ambani and make education more quality-oriented and inclusive.
NEP 2020
Education policy rests on a tripod of Universal Access, Gender Equity, and Promotion of Excellence. NEP 2020 puts a special thrust on quality, in line with SDG Goal 4 on quality education.
Noting the consistent plateau in learning outcomes in government schools, as brought out by successive ASER surveys since 2010, it has pitched for universalisation of foundational literacy and numeracy for all students by the age of 10 or Grade 3 by 2025; improving early childhood education being imparted to around 30.3 million poor children in Anganwadis; changing the 10+2+3 structure to 5+3+3+4; dismantling the wall separating liberal arts from STEM; establishing the NRF to promote a culture of innovation across India’s universities, colleges, and research laboratories; and improving GER in higher education to 50%. It has reiterated the Kothari Commission’s pitch for allocating 6% of GDP to education.
Sadly, we lost two years in realising these laudable objectives, but since 2023, implementation of NEP 2020 has been high on rhetoric and low on outcomes.
A Stocktaking
There are roughly 10 lakh government schools and 3.4 lakh private schools, with the number of universities increasing from around 640 in 2014 to 1,117 in 2025. The major spurt has been an increase in private universities from 171 to 455, with hardly any increase in central universities.
The NIPUN Bharat Mission to achieve FLN still has substantial ground to cover to eliminate “learning poverty”. Rural digital divides, structural teacher shortages in remote regions, and a lingering cultural obsession with rote testing over conceptual comprehension slow down classroom-level success.
Further, while institutional mechanisms allow liberal arts and STEM to intersect, a 2026 systemic review published in Frontiers in Education shows that the rollout of these multidisciplinary frameworks reveals a clear divide between adoption and capability. Studies highlight that 72% of institutions suffer from severe faculty gaps when executing true interdisciplinary teaching.
While premier Tier-1 institutions feature thriving interdisciplinary hubs, 82% of HEIs lack the physical infrastructure and laboratory-to-studio access required for integrated STEAM education. Despite curriculum changes, market pressures still disproportionately favour traditional STEM pathways due to direct tech placement pipelines, reducing liberal arts electives to mere box-ticking exercises rather than deep-dive studies.
ANRF, which was created in 2023 with a corpus of ₹50,000 crore and expected 72% private-sector funding, has not received the anticipated funding. Further, its objective to democratise research is not being realised due to funding favouring Tier-1 institutions. The quality of early childhood education for children in Anganwadis and for children with disabilities remains pathetic.
The Way Forward
Sadly, the allocation to education, which is a joint responsibility of the states and the Centre, stands fixed at around 4%, as against the recommended 6%, with the Centre contributing only 1%. As per the MoSPI Comprehensive Modular Survey, coaching costs average ₹9,950 annually for urban higher secondary students, compared to ₹4,548 for rural families, due to perceived and actual gaps in formal education quality.
The urban-rural divide and the wide chasm between the minuscule number of Tier-I educational institutions and the large number of state and private universities in terms of resource allocation and quality put the quality dimension under severe stress. Affording quality education in private institutions is beyond the capability of most Indians.
With the Centre outsourcing education to the private sector, the cry for accountability in conducting competitive examinations in a transparent manner and improving the neglected edifice of public education is understandable, as it has critical implications for employability.
Tagore wrote in Gitanjali (1910), “The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.” Tagore’s hope that the song of quality education will blossom remains an unfinished script, as political will and priorities are still focused on higher growth, without addressing human capability development, with the government at the vanguard.
(The writer is a Professor Emeritus, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. Views expressed are personal.)