Five years have passed since the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was unveiled, a document that intends to reshape India’s education system over a 15-20 year horizon. Two of these first five years were consumed by the pandemic, forcing schools to shut down and governments to scramble for solutions to keep learning alive, and then later to recover lost learning. Despite this disruption, this last half-decade has seen significant developments – some promising, some contested, and some quietly transformative.

As a member of the NEP drafting committee, I have watched these unfold with both hope and impatience. The policy’s vision is bold: a fundamental reimagining of school education in India. That is equally true for higher education, but this piece is focused on schools. Like any longterm roadmap, it has set milestones. The unfulfilled potential of the NEP is reflected in those cases where these milestones have not yet been met.

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Take, for instance, the idea of clustering public schools – an administrative structural improvement meant to enable 10-15 schools to share resources like labs, playgrounds, and specialist teachers in arts or physical education. This would not only have optimised scarce resources but would also have improved equity. Simply because given the small sizes of many of our primary schools, it is not possible at all to have all these resources in each school. Yet, only a handful of states have made progress here. Similarly, board examinations continue to remain high-stakes, memory-driven affairs – across........

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