Absorb the following statements fully : 75% of Class 3 students cannot read text that should be readable by a grade below (Grade 2 level). Just below 50% of Class 5 students cannot read a Grade 2 level text. A little over 20% of Class 8 students cannot read a Grade 2 level text. This is the state of affairs after 78 years of India’s Independence and five years after the New Education policy, 2020 came into effect for its government school educated students.

The situation is almost identical for mathematics. Two out of three Class 3 students were still unable to solve the subtraction problems correctly. Among Class 5 students, the proportion of those who could solve the division problems has improved from 27.9% in 2018 to 30.7% in 2024, implying that almost 70% of them are lagging behind. Among Class 8 students, improvement in basic arithmetic rose marginally from 44.1% in 2018 to 45.8% in 2024.

Recently, the latest ASER (annual status of education report) became public and there was much celebration from all quarters on the minor improvements recorded in the learning outcomes of students across the public school sector but many experts argued that there was in fact very little to celebrate. Education has been the single biggest failure of successive governments.

The question is why. On this, there is an almost unanimous consensus. Almost anyone one speaks to in the K-12 education landscape will identify the same problems afflicting the government school system since it was freed from colonial rule in 1947. But among the long list of problem areas, there are two big elephants in the room, one of which has been taken note of in the New Education Policy (NEP), 2020 (cleared by Cabinet in July 2020) and the other has conveniently been left out.

The first big unresolved problem, from which originates the rest of the inefficiency of the system, and unlike most other public services like hospitals, is that India faces a big “problem of plenty”.

As things stand, India has over 10 lakh government schools and around 127 million children attending these. Compare this to China, which (in 2023, according to the Chinese government) had 498,300 schools where 291 million students were enrolled. In other words, China has less than half the number of schools for a little over double the number of students. This is the main problem, which finds its roots in the RTE Act of 2009.

The universal access clause in the Act has led to a situation where we have a large and growing number of under-resourced buildings and often “sheds” which are called schools across the country. As things stand, there are close to 400,000 such schools across the country that are languishing as they are not well resourced. These are often just decrepit rooms where children can play or co-exist for a few hours every day with an adult overseeing them. At most of these schools, there are at........

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