MARIAN PINHEIRO
In almost every Indian house hold, the arrival of a child re arranges the family’s priori ties overnight. Everything bends around the child’s needs. As the child grows, schooling becomes the family’s central preoccupa tion: which school, which teach ers, how the child is progressing. Parents instinctively understand that the family’s future is bound up with the quality of the child’s education. It is one of the most universal instincts in Indian so ciety. As far back as 1966, the Kothari Commission, India’s first major post-Independence re view of education, recommend ed that the country spend at least 6 per cent of its Gross Na tional Product on education, ar guing that no nation could devel op without treating education as its highest investment priority.
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That recommendation was ech oed in the National Policy on Ed ucation of 1986, and again in the National Education Policy (NEP) of 2020. Three separate policy generations, across nearly sixty years, arrived at the same num ber. And in nearly sixty years, India has never come close to it. The figures tell their own sto ry. India’s combined Central-and State spending on education has hovered between 2.7 and 4.6 per cent of GDP over the past decade, whereas the United States and China have both spent above 6 per cent of GDP on education in recent years, and Japan has spent over 7 per cent. A target set two generations ago, reaffirmed by every subsequent policy doc ument, remains an aspiration rather than a commitment. This signals where education genuinely sits in the hierarchy of State priorities. Education, whose returns are slow, inter generational, and politically un glamorous, consistently loses out to expenditure that yields quicker, more visible political dividends. Interestingly, public education system that most urgently needs investment is overwhelmingly the one used by the poor. Those who set the budgets, by and large, do not send their own chil dren through it.
When policy is made by people insulated from its consequences, urgency has a way of evaporating. The Right to Education Act pushed enrolment close to uni versal levels for the 6-14 age group. The most recent Annu al Status of Education Report (ASER 2024), which surveys learning outcomes across rural India, reports that the system still has a long way to go and has not yet secured the most basic promise of primary education for a majority of its children, even as India builds expressways, metro systems and increasingly ambi tious digital infrastructure. India is not alone in having once been poor, divided and un dereducated. What distinguishes the countries that transformed their circumstances is the seri ousness with which they treated education as the primary lever of national development, not one lever among many. Finland is the case most fre quently cited in international policy discussions, and for good reason. In the 1960s, Finland was a modest Nordic econo my trying to catch up with its wealthier neighbours. Its ed ucation reforms began with a single, unusually patient deci sion: to make teaching one of the most selective and prestigious professions in the country, re quiring every teacher to hold a research-based master’s degree from a university. The result to day is a system that performs at or near the top of international rankings without the exam-driv en intensity found elsewhere, built on the simple premise that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers.
South Korea offers an even more dramatic story: in 1945, at the end of Japanese colonial rule, Korea’s adult literacy rate stood at around 22 per cent. The Korean War (1950-53) then destroyed more than half the nation’s school buildings. From that base of devastation, succes sive Korean governments treated education as a matter of nation al survival rather than routine policy. By the late 1960s, adult literacy had already crossed 90 per cent; today it is effectively universal, and South Korea has among the highest tertiary ed ucation attainment rates in the world. Most economic historians agree that this investment in hu man capital, not natural resourc es, is the foundation on which its rise from post-war poverty to the world’s tenth-largest econo my was built. Singapore, another re source-poor nation at independ ence in 1965, followed a similar logic: it treated its people as its only exploitable resource and built an education system explic itly designed to feed a national economic strategy, with heavy investment in teacher quality, curriculum reform tied to shift ing economic needs, and a bu reaucracy that placed education planning at the centre of nation al planning rather than at its pe riphery. India’s challenge today is not a lack of understanding of what is required — the Kothari Com mission diagnosed it accurately sixty years ago. The challenge is political will and sequencing. This lop-sidedness has conse quences beyond economics. Where large numbers of young people are inadequately educat ed, are then unable to find dig nified work, and watch a visibly widening gap between their own prospects and those of a privi leged, better-schooled minority, the resulting frustration does not stay contained. It feeds social resentment, communal polarisa tion and political volatility — the very tensions that a genuinely well-educated, economically confident citizenry is far less susceptible to.
Historically, edu cation has functioned as one of the most reliable solvents of ex actly these tensions, by expand ing opportunity broadly enough that group identity becomes less central to survival. What is required—where to build, what technology to adopt, how to structure incentives— must be tested against a single question: does this raise the quality and reach of education available to an ordinary Indian child? Roads should be judged partly by whether they get chil dren to better schools. Technol ogy adoption should be judged partly by whether it improves what happens inside a class room, not merely by how mod ern it looks in a press release. Budget allocations should be judged against the NEP’s own 6 per cent target, which successive governments have set for them selves and then quietly aban doned. Above all, India needs a polit ical class that sees every Indian child—not merely its own chil dren, many of whom study in India’s best private schools or go abroad—as a matter of first-or der national interest. Until that shift in thinking occurs, budget ary allocations will keep falling short of promises, government schools will continue playing catch-up, and India’s aspiration to developed-nation status will re main, as it has for eighty years, a destination perpetually deferred.
Eighty years after Independ ence, the arithmetic is not com plicated. A nation that wants to be judged as developed must first ensure that the child born into an ordinary Indian house hold is treated, by the state, with the same urgency that family already treats her with at home. Nothing else. (The writer is a professor of Law & an education consultant)
