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Writing on the Wall

This chapter assesses India’s education system. Making adequate provision for education, enabling people to pursue better economic opportunities and lead a dignified life, widening their social horizons, and nurturing their sense of worldly wonder, are among the most basic responsibilities of any democracy. India’s dismal and inequal education system sharply contrasts with the other big economies of Asia. Particularly telling is the way the goal of providing ‘free and compulsory education for all children’ within ten years of the adoption of the 1949 Constitution took fifty-two years to become a fundamental right. It took six more years before the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act became actionable law, that too after a protracted movement for universal education by social activists. The result of this feet-dragging is that India is now home to 313 million illiterate people, or 40 per cent of the world’s unlettered population. Since the introduction of neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s, the state has progressively retreated from the field of education, widening the gulf between the population segments with and without access to education. If the state’s failure to provide equal access to elementary education sets this disparity in motion, it is entrenched firmly by the increasingly important role of private capital in higher education. The result: an anti-democratic reproduction of traditional patterns of economic disparities and restricted social mobility.