By: Rinku R.
Education reform in India is treated the way people treat New Year’s resolutions: declared with great seriousness, announced with fireworks, and quietly abandoned by February—except in India, February lasts decades.
Every few years, the nation wakes up in collective panic. Newspapers shout that India’s demographic dividend is about to expire. Panels warn that our students are unemployable, our classrooms outdated, and our teachers overburdened. Committees are formed. Acronyms are born. PowerPoint slides bloom like lotus flowers. And then, just when reform seems within reach, the system does what it does best: it pauses, postpones, and proceeds as if nothing fundamentally needs to change.
Urgency is India’s favorite adjective. Education reform is urgent because half the population is under 30. It is urgent because global rankings embarrass us. It is urgent because automation is coming, AI is here, and rote learning is still doing brisk business. The urgency is real. The irony is that urgency has become a permanent condition, like traffic congestion—acknowledged, complained about, and fully normalized.
The National Education Policy of 2020 was supposed to be different. It promised flexibility, multidisciplinary learning, reduced rote memorization, and a reimagining of assessment. Five years on, its language is quoted more often than its outcomes are measured. Reform, once again, has been eloquent at the top and evasive at the bottom.
What makes Indian education reform so reliably incomplete is not lack of ideas. India is drowning in ideas. We have policy documents thicker than textbooks, vision statements more poetic than literature syllabi, and reform agendas that promise to transform everything from preschool to PhD. The problem is that reform in India is ceremonial. It is performed at the top, applauded in conferences, and rarely survives contact with the classroom.
Policies arrive like royal decrees, assuming that a rural school with one teacher, two rooms, and intermittent electricity will smoothly implement the same reforms as an elite urban institution with smart boards and international collaborations. The gap between policy ambition and ground reality is not a crack—it is a canyon. We bridge it with optimism and hope for the best.
Curriculum reform is the most rehearsed act in this play. We periodically declare war on rote learning, then reward it with high-stakes examinations that still prioritize recall over reasoning, despite repeated promises to move toward competency-based assessment. Students quickly learn the real syllabus: don’t think too much, don’t deviate, and above all, don’t surprise the examiner.
Teachers, meanwhile, are expected to be miracle workers. They must adopt new pedagogies, integrate technology, handle administrative duties, manage overcrowded classrooms, counsel students, and attend training workshops that often teach them everything except how to teach better. We blame teachers for poor outcomes while denying them autonomy, respect, and sustained professional support. Reform asks them to run faster, not smarter.
Then there is governance—the unsung villain of the story. Education in India is split between the Centre, states, boards, councils, universities, regulators, and committees whose roles overlap just enough to ensure confusion without accountability. Everyone has authority; no one has responsibility. When reforms fail, the system shrugs collectively and appoints another committee to study why the previous committee did not succeed.
Technology, of course, is wheeled in as the magic solution. Digital classrooms, online platforms, and AI-driven learning are presented as shortcuts to progress. But technology layered on top of weak pedagogy only digitizes inequality. A recorded lecture cannot fix a disengaged curriculum, and an app cannot replace a motivated teacher. Yet we continue to believe that education can be upgraded the way phones are—just install the latest version and reboot.
What truly keeps reform incomplete is political impatience. Education reform demands time—longer than election cycles, longer than press attention spans. Its results are slow, subtle, and deeply unglamorous. You cannot cut a ribbon for improved critical thinking. You cannot tweet a graph showing better citizenship. So reforms are designed for announcement, not endurance.
And yet, the tragedy is that India cannot afford this cycle. A young population educated by an outdated system is not a dividend; it is a deferred crisis. The cost of incomplete reform is paid by students who memorize instead of understand, graduates who hold degrees without skills, and teachers who lose faith in a system that never fully commits to change.
The syllabus may change. The acronyms certainly will. But unless reform learns to finish what it so dramatically begins, Indian education will remain a work perpetually “under implementation”—forever urgent, forever unfinished.
