India’s Education Wars: Modi’s Blueprint Meets A People’s Revolt – OpEd

The Modi government has set out to remake India’s schools through the National Education Policy, a sweeping blueprint drafted in Delhi with scant consultation from the states. Presented as a visionary reform, it centralizes authority, elevates ideology, and accelerates privatization—reshaping the classroom into an instrument of power. But a counter-document, the People’s Education Policy, is gathering force, offering a radically different vision: one rooted in federalism, pluralism, and the conviction that education is not a commodity but the republic’s most essential public good.

In the summer of 2020, as India staggered through its first pandemic lockdown, the government in New Delhi quietly enacted a sweeping change. Without parliamentary debate, and with scant consultation of the country’s states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet introduced the National Education Policy (NEP), a document of nearly five hundred pages that claimed to chart the nation’s educational future. At a moment when millions of children were locked out of school, the government was redesigning the very system to which they would return.

The NEP, framed as a visionary reform, promised to modernize India’s classrooms, expand access to higher education, and restore pride in India’s civilizational heritage. It was presented as both a pedagogical breakthrough and a cultural rebirth. But to many educators, activists, and state leaders, it felt like something else: an attempt to consolidate ideological control over the minds of India’s youth, under the guise of reform.

Nearly five years on, a counter-document has emerged. The People’s Education Policy (PEP), drafted by an alliance of teachers’ unions and civil society organizations, positions itself not merely as a critique but as an alternative blueprint. If the NEP represents a centralized, top-down redesign of India’s classrooms, the PEP insists on a bottom-up, pluralist model, one that treats education as a public good and a democratic imperative.

The tension between the two documents is not bureaucratic. It is existential. For the world’s largest youth population, education is destiny. Whether the NEP or the PEP sets the course will shape India’s democratic future, its economic possibility, and its cultural soul.

The Politics of Control

The most striking feature of the NEP is its centralization. Education in India has historically been a contested terrain between the Union government and the states. Until 1976, it was the states alone who held constitutional responsibility. The NEP, drafted in Delhi with minimal consultation, bypasses this delicate balance. It envisions a uniform national curriculum, steered by a central authority that places the Prime Minister at the apex of a newly created National Research Foundation.

This may look efficient on paper. But in practice, it has provoked resistance. States such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and West Bengal have balked at the imposition, insisting on their right to craft policies suited to their linguistic and cultural landscapes. The Supreme Court, too, has weighed in, noting that states cannot be coerced into compliance. Education in India, the Court reminded, is a shared responsibility—a constitutional compact that the NEP risks unravelling.

The PEP, by contrast, proposes a return to first principles: that education be restored to the State List. Far from a radical disruption, this is a reversion to the constitutional status quo prior to 1976. In doing so, the PEP recognizes India not as a homogenous nation but as a mosaic of languages, histories, and pedagogical traditions. Federalism here is not a concession but a condition for stability.

Economics of Exclusion

The NEP’s rhetoric is expansive. It reaffirms India’s long-standing but unfulfilled commitment to spend six per cent of GDP on education. Yet the numbers tell another story. In the years since the NEP’s adoption, government spending on education has stagnated; in real terms, it has declined. The gap has been filled by private actors—elite schools, coaching centers, and an aggressively expanding EdTech industry. The result is a deepening stratification, in which the wealthy purchase pathways to success while the poor are left with underfunded public schools and rising fees.

This privatization-by-stealth is not accidental. It reflects the Modi government’s broader embrace of market logics in sectors once considered public goods. Education, in this vision, is less a right than a commodity, subject to the efficiency of the market and the discipline of competition.

The PEP, in turn, calls for a constitutional guarantee: a mandatory six per cent of GDP for education, rising to ten per cent over time. This is not merely a demand for more spending but a reassertion of principle—that education is infrastructure as vital as roads or power. By extending free education from pre-primary through secondary levels, the PEP seeks to underwrite not just access but equity, making the democratic promise of schooling tangible.

The Philosophy of Knowledge

At its heart, the debate is not about budgets or bureaucracies but about the purpose of education itself. The NEP’s philosophical ambition is the revival of an “Indian Knowledge System.” Its proponents describe this as a revalorization of ancient traditions, from Vedic mathematics to Sanskrit texts. Its critics see something else: an ideological project that privileges a Hindu-majoritarian narrative, embedding it into textbooks and curricula in ways that sideline India’s plural heritage.

The institutional design reinforces these fears. By positioning political authority at the helm of research funding, the NEP blurs the line between statecraft and scholarship. The danger is not simply indoctrination but the slow erosion of academic freedom—the subtle pressure to conform, the muffling of dissent, the narrowing of inquiry.

The PEP, conversely, defines education as the defence of autonomy: the freedom of teachers to teach without interference, the right of institutions to set curricula, the obligation to cultivate questioning rather than conformity. In this, it returns to a philosophical lineage that stretches from Vidyasagar’s secular education to B. R. Ambedkar’s insistence that education is the “militant weapon” of democracy.

Cultural Stakes

India’s classrooms have always been mirrors of its cultural tensions. In colonial times, debates over Macaulay’s Minute on Education—English versus vernacular instruction—were battles over identity and power. After independence, the Kothari Commission framed education as the key to building a modern republic, one that reconciled diversity with unity.

The NEP of Modi Government echoes high sounding ambition but risks tipping the balance toward homogenization. By promoting Hindi and Sanskrit, by insisting on centralized curricula, it marginalizes the lived languages and local traditions that sustain India’s pluralism. Cultural richness, in this model, is streamlined into a singular narrative of national pride.

The PEP resists this flattening. It insists that children learn best in their mother tongues, that curricula must reflect local contexts, that diversity is not a hurdle but a resource. This is not just pedagogy but philosophy: a recognition that India’s democracy is nourished by its multiplicity, not threatened by it.

The Cost of Choices

What is at stake in this policy duel is more than pedagogy. It is the very architecture of India’s future. The NEP promises world-class universities and employable graduates but risks producing a generation trained to obey rather than to question. The PEP demands public investment and decentralization, but if implemented, it could unleash both social mobility and intellectual creativity on a scale India has long deferred.

The contrast is between control and freedom, between a state that moulds citizens for its purposes and a people who claim education as their right. The Indian classroom has become the country’s most consequential battleground. The winner of this struggle will not only shape the republic’s children but also define what kind of republic those children will inherit.