The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 rightly envisaged a transformation of the schooling experience, to ensure a scientifically literate student population. It identified some of the important challenges the existing schooling system faces in providing science education. Lack of resources for advanced science education, including lab equipment, technology, and specialised materials, has been pointed out as a major challenge. The document talked of difficulties in finding and training good teachers in specialised science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Five years after the implementation of NEP 2020, its concerns about science education remain unaddressed. The recently published PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) 2024 survey report, has highlighted significant learning gaps among students in different grades in all subjects, including science. The average scores of class 9 students were only 40% in science and 37% in maths. The scores are even lower in government and government-aided schools at 37% and 33%.

The problem takes on a different dimension in the higher secondary stage, where students must opt for subjects of their choice. While visiting a well-functioning higher secondary school in Rajasthan as part of our work on the Public Report on Secondary Education (PROSE), we found that though students scored high in their 10th board exams, most transferred to other schools at the higher secondary stage, primarily because they could not study subjects of their choice.........

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