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It is worth asking how a response billed as the other side of a debate managed to leave every specific claim in my piece untouched. My article was about a structural shift – the state’s decision to strip CBSE affiliation from over a thousand government high schools, the resulting collapse of Andhra Pradesh’s claim to a standalone regional CBSE office and what this says about the direction the Chandrababu Naidu government is taking public education compared to the infrastructure-first reforms of the previous administration.

The reply offered a laundry list of ongoing government activities: a new dashboard here, a teacher-training number there, a welfare scheme with an impressive rupee figure attached. Nowhere does the CBSE de-affiliation appear. Nowhere does the loss of the Vijayawada regional office appear. If this was meant as a rebuttal, it rebutted an argument I did not make.

That mismatch is not incidental; it is close to the whole story. A response to the government is dismantling a structural gain cannot consist of a catalogue of unrelated initiatives, however large the numbers attached. Citing 13 lakh students assessed for reading fluency or 45,000 Anganwadi workers trained tells us about activity, not about direction. Volume of activity is not evidence against a claim about the trajectory of policy.

The irony deepens when you place the CBSE de-affiliation against........

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