Every year, millions of students across India are given the same promise: study hard and make necessary sacrifices now, so that education can secure a better future. Families spend enormous sums on school fees, coaching centres and competitive examinations in the hope that all this sacrifice will eventually be rewarded. Students spend day and night studying hard to clear competitive exams, often sacrificing their social lives, hobbies, and even adequate sleep, hoping that all their hard work will finally pay off. Instead, paper leaks destroy years of preparation, graduates, post-graduates, and even PhD holders struggle to find stable employment. Public educational institutions are systematically weakened. An entire generation is being pushed into an endless race whose finish line keeps moving further away. All the issues with our education system stem from this one point: what purpose does it serve? On one hand, education has been transformed into a lucrative industry that extracts wealth from millions of families and produces a vast workforce tailored to the needs of capital. On the other hand, as always, it has become an efficient tool of the ruling regime’s ideological propagation.
The history of education in pre- and post-independence India has been highly dynamic. If we look deeply into the history of Indian education, it can be categorized into several phases, such as Ancient India, the pre-independence era, and the post-independence era.
During Ancient India, the education system in the country was entirely based on the Vedic system, with gurukuls serving as the key educational institutions. Gurukuls laid the foundation for religious and caste-based education in India. Later, this system was continued by Islamic rulers through madrasas. However, this pattern changed significantly with the Charter Act of 1813, under which the East India Company allocated grants for the promotion and implementation of a scientific education system.
Subsequently, Wood’s Dispatch of 1854 emphasized the expansion of public education and led to the establishment of three public universities: Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. Later, the Indian Universities Act of 1904 brought universities under greater state control and introduced reforms to improve their administration and functioning.
After the transfer of power in 1947, education was at least formally viewed as a public responsibility. The Kothari Commission (1964-66) described it as a powerful instrument for social change and proposed a Common School System to reduce inequality. These goals were never fully implemented by the state, which served the ruling classes in a society shaped by extreme exploitation and inequality; however, education was at least recognised as something the state had a duty to provide. From 1976 onwards, India’s ruling classes deliberately sought to capture the education system. Before the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976, education was exclusively a subject under the State List. However, under pressure from the World Bank and the Indian capitalist class, education was transferred from the State List to the Concurrent List. This move was viewed by many critics as an attack on India’s federal structure. Although both the Central and State governments were granted legislative authority over education, the Central Government acquired greater influence than the states. According to this perspective, the amendment primarily benefited capitalist interests, the private sector, and India’s feudal ruling classes, making it easier to implement policies that advanced the interests of the ruling elite.
The role of the World Bank became increasingly significant following the centralization of education through the 42nd Constitutional Amendment. Critics argue that the World Bank functions primarily to facilitate and safeguard global capital markets rather than to promote educational equity. Consequently, they contend that the institution is structurally and ideologically unconcerned with addressing the educational needs of India’s marginalized communities. From the 1980s onwards, the World Bank increasingly influenced education policies in many postcolonial countries, including India. According to this interpretation, several educational reforms introduced by the Government of India reflected these policy prescriptions.
In 1986, the Government of India introduced the National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986. Although the policy appeared progressive and emphasized social justice by addressing issues such as caste inequality, gender discrimination, and the promotion of scientific education, critics argue that it also marked the beginning of systematic private-sector participation in Indian education. This trend intensified following the neoliberal economic reforms of 1991. Under the Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization (LPG) framework, India increasingly adopted Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models in education. Critics contend that these market-oriented reforms reflected the World Bank’s broader strategy of promoting privatization. Rather than improving educational quality, they argue that such policies deepened educational inequality, reinforced a multi-tiered schooling system, and further marginalized disadvantaged communities. By allowing market forces to shape educational priorities, these reforms, according to critics, diverted attention and resources away from the constitutional objective of establishing a universal, equitable, and high-quality public education system.
In 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and India became one of its founding members. From this perspective, India’s membership further opened the education sector to global capital, enabling private investment and aligning education more closely with the demands of the global labour market rather than with the broader goals of social transformation and democratic development.
Antonio Gramsci, in his theory of cultural hegemony, emphasized the central role of education in sustaining the ideological dominance of the ruling class. He argued that organic intellectuals help reproduce hegemony by legitimizing existing power structures, while public intellectuals play a crucial role in building counter-hegemony by challenging dominant ideologies. Applying this framework to contemporary India, critics argue that appointments of professors and Vice-Chancellors have increasingly been influenced by ideological affiliations, particularly connections with the RSS, rather than by academic merit alone. According to this view, many highly qualified scholars with strong teaching and research credentials have been overlooked because they lacked political patronage or ideological alignment.
At the same time, critics argue that public intellectuals who challenge state policies have increasingly been subjected to surveillance, criminalization, and imprisonment under labels such as “Urban Naxals.” A frequently cited example is Professor G. N. Saibaba, who spent more than nine years in prison before being acquitted. Another prominent example is Professor Anand Teltumbde, a noted scholar, public intellectual, and academic. Both have been internationally recognized for their scholarly contributions and have been associated with prestigious institutions such as the University of Delhi and the Goa Institute of Management, respectively. Critics contend that these cases illustrate a broader pattern of targeting dissenting intellectuals, thereby weakening the space for critical thought and democratic debate within India’s higher education system.
Education increasingly came to be viewed not as a right that society should guarantee, but as a commodity and an investment. New buzzwords such as employability, skills, competitiveness and human capital became central to policymaking. The purpose of education shifted from creating informed and critical-thinking citizens to producing a cheap and skilled labour force for the economy that serves the interests of foreign capital. As a result, private schools expanded rapidly, private colleges and universities multiplied, and educational technology companies entered the sector in search of profit. Access to quality education increasingly depended on a family’s ability to pay, while public institutions attended by the majority remained heavily underfunded and thus kept shrinking. This was not simply a retreat of the state. Rather, the state actively reorganised education to serve market interests. Instead of strengthening public institutions, governments encouraged schools and universities to seek private funding, build corporate partnerships and operate according to market principles. Education was gradually transformed from a social responsibility into a business opportunity.
The BJP did not begin this process when it came to power in 2014, but it has accelerated and consolidated it while combining it with its broader ideological project of Hindutva. Economic restructuring and ideological control have advanced together. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is perhaps the clearest expression of this direction. While marketed as a modern and transformative policy, its emphasis on vocationalisation, public-private partnerships, digital learning and market orientation further aligns education with the needs of capital. Universities are encouraged to become “autonomous”, but under conditions of inadequate public funding, this just means higher fees, dependence on corporate partnerships and increasing privatisation. At the same time, education is being narrowed to the goal of producing a workforce that can quickly adapt to changing market demands. Critical thinking, historical understanding and democratic participation become secondary to employability. This economic transformation is accompanied by the ideological one. Education is being used to shape the political consciousness of the people. School textbooks are rewritten, historical events are selectively emphasised or erased, and educational institutions become sites for promoting the zingoistic Hindutva narrative. According to Sidney Verba and Gabriel Almond, one of the earliest stages of political socialization takes place at the school level. If this perspective is applied to the Indian education system, it can be argued that critical thinking is gradually being undermined from the very beginning of formal education. As a result, the education system contributes to the development of an authoritarian mindset among students and shapes a political culture that is more likely to sustain existing structures of authority rather than encourage democratic questioning and critical engagement. The aim is not merely to educate students but to produce obedient citizens who are economically useful and politically compliant.
The recurring paper leak scandals further expose the crisis at the heart of this system. Between 2019 and 2024, India witnessed at least 41 paper leak incidents across 15 states, affecting millions of aspirants. Students often lose years of their lives to cancelled examinations, delayed results and prolonged legal disputes. These exam scams are not merely isolated incidents of corruption, but predictable outcomes of an education system that has turned education into an expensive commodity and concentrated access to higher education and employment into a handful of high-stakes examinations. When opportunities are artificially made scarce, such fraud and criminal networks inevitably flourish. Often, the government itself is behind these scams. Notably, Subodh Kumar Singh, the then Director General of the National Testing Agency (NTA), was implicated in the 2024 NEET and UGC-NET scandals. As people came to know this, the NTA faced widespread public outrage. The BJP-led central government was compelled to remove him from the post. However, despite all this, not only was he not arrested, he was instead appointed as Additional Secretary and Financial Adviser in the Ministry of Steel. What a terrible punishment it is! Pradeep Kumar Joshi, who has served as the Chairperson of the NTA since 2023, was also accused in the 2024 NEET controversy. RTI activist Ajay Dubey had revealed that while serving as Chairman of the Madhya Pradesh Public Service Commission (MPPSC), Joshi was appointed as a chief pracharak of the RSS, the principal organisation behind Brahmanical Hindutva fascism in India. During his tenure, multiple instances of scams and corruption in MPPSC examinations also came to light. Nevertheless, he was subsequently appointed Chairman of the Chhattisgarh Public Service Commission. During that period, allegations also surfaced regarding his involvement in the leakage of question papers for the Ayurvedic Medical Officer (AMO) recruitment examination. Later, after the completion of his tenure at the UPSC, Joshi was appointed Chairperson of the NTA, the disastrous consequences of which we have been witnessing continuously since 2024.
While more young people than ever before are entering schools, colleges and universities, the economy has failed to generate enough secure jobs. Education is falsely being sold as the main route to social mobility even as job opportunities shrink. As public sector recruitment slows and contractualisation spreads, examinations have become mechanisms for distributing scarcity, with millions competing for a limited number of jobs. This environment has fuelled the rapid growth of the coaching industry. Cities such as Kota have become centres of a vast examination economy where students spend years preparing for highly competitive tests. Large educational technology firms and coaching institutes have been profiting from the anxiety of millions of students and their families pushed into desperation. The myth of meritocracy helps sustain this. Examinations are portrayed as fair measures of talent and hard work, but students do not begin from the same starting point. Access to coaching centres, private tutors, digital resources, English-language proficiency and supportive educational environments gives privileged students significant advantages. Childhoods are lost in the inhuman rat race, their social lives (having friends) and hobbies (if they can’t be monetised) are discouraged, and their curiosity and intellectual exploration are pushed aside.
And taking advantage of such precarious times, the Hindutva project enters education. While foreign capital and the Indian ruling classes that serve it reorganise education according to their economic interests, the ruling ideology of Brahminical Hindutva reshapes education culturally and slowly builds the political consciousness of the masses. It ingrains what it means to be an Indian, i.e. a blind champion of this fascist ideology, in their minds. The struggle over education in India today is therefore over how future generations will understand society and their fellow citizens. Educational institutes shape collective memory, determine whose histories are to be remembered, whose are to be defamed and forgotten. The RSS has long understood this and has used education as a tool of the same. Its project has never been confined to elections; it has focused on building institutions that either directly propagate the ideology or indirectly influence morality and cultural identity over generations. The textbook revisions, changes in university administration, interventions in research institutions, attacks on scientific temper, propagation of Hindutva pseudo-science and the expansion of RSS-affiliated educational networks are all parts of this. The saffronisation of education is being hailed as ‘decolonisation’. British colonial historiography undoubtedly distorted Indian history and served imperial interests. But decolonisation is not about replacing one ruling mythology with another. Decolonisation means dismantling the economic, political and ideological structures created by colonialism and exposing the systems of exploitation that continue to survive long after formal independence. It requires an honest understanding of history, not its falsified rewriting. BJP-RSS’s objective is not to free historical consciousness from colonial distortions but to replace them with Brahminical-Hindutva narratives that serve their political interests. The central mechanism through which this is done is the communal reinterpretation of Indian history. Centuries of Muslim rule are portrayed as equivalent to British colonial rule, reducing hundreds of years of complex history into a myth of “an eternal Hindu civilisation repeatedly victimised by foreign invaders”. Empires, kingdoms and dynasties certainly emerged through conquest in feudalism, but modern colonialism was a specific system of imperialist domination built upon the systematic extraction of wealth and the subordination of colonised countries to the interests of foreign capital.
By deliberately distorting these distinctions, the BJP-RSS obscures the real history of colonialism and replaces it with a Hindu-Muslim binary that serves their politics. What is most ironic about their claims of decolonisation is the RSS’s and the Hindu Mahasabha’s roles in the freedom struggle itself. They repeatedly bootlicked the British at various moments, be it Savarkar, Hedgewar, Golwalker or Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. Those who loudly proclaim themselves defenders of nationalism were never at the forefront of the struggle against the actual colonisers. They’ve declared various times that “war” against Muslims is their primary duty, rather than confronting the British. They also described British rule as “God-given” and “independence” from the rule under the “invading” Muslims. Thus, they also opposed the national freedom struggle.
Today, while speaking the language of nationalism and ‘Vishwa Guru Bharat’, they continue to keep India subordinated to foreign capital and imperialist interests. In this saffronisation process over the past decade, NCERT textbooks have repeatedly been revised, with sections on democratic movements, caste struggles and Muslim rule periods reduced, rewritten or removed, while exaggerated ‘Hindu’ civilisational claims and pseudo-scientific assertions have gained legitimacy. The caste system, which is the backbone of Brahminism, has maintained the status quo of the ‘Hindu’ society for at least two thousand years by exploiting and oppressing a large section of the society (Dalits or lower-caste people). And now, the history of caste is being diluted to establish a homogenous Hindu identity.
Parallel to these curricular interventions, the RSS has expanded its own educational infrastructure on an enormous scale. Through Vidya Bharati and affiliated organisations, the Sangh Parivar today oversees more than 25,000 educational institutions, reaching around 35 lakh students and employing over 1.5 lakh teachers and staff, alongside teacher-training centres, hostels, tribal education programmes and numerous affiliated initiatives. Unlike other electoral parties, the RSS operates on a generational basis; it not only seeks to win elections through the BJP. In Hedgewar’s own words, what they also engage themselves in is ‘man-making’. And this man-making project of saffronisation and privatisation go hand in hand. The privatisation of education creates insecurity, intense competition and individualism among students. They are forced into endless cycles of examinations, credential accumulation and self-optimisation simply to survive in an economy that doesn’t provide stable employment. But such widespread anger also creates a political problem for the ruling classes. If millions of young people begin asking why unemployment is rising, why public investment is declining and why wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, the legitimacy of the entire system comes under question. That is why the Hindutva project redirects this collective anger towards manufactured enemies – the Muslims, the ‘anti-nationals’, the ‘pen-welding naxals’, ‘illegal immigrants’, Pakistan and various internal and external conspiracies. Privatisation creates anxiety, and saffronisation weaponises it. Across the world, periods of economic crisis have often been accompanied by such intensified forms of chauvinism and fascism. India is experiencing its own version of this process.
Higher education is also undergoing an unprecedented process of centralisation. Through bodies such as the UGC, the NTA, and various accreditation mechanisms, decision-making over admissions, curricula and institutional priorities is concentrated solely in the hands of the central government. The NEP 2020 accelerates this under the garb of efficiency and reform, steadily reducing institutional autonomy and standardising educational spaces across a highly diverse country. Universities have historically been important centres of democratic mobilisation and dissent. It is, therefore, no coincidence that campuses have become sites of state surveillance and bureaucratic control. Student protests are treated like national security issues, and protesting students are called anti-national ‘cockroaches’. In response to that, a platform has recently emerged, the “Cockroach Janta Party”. It reflects the spontaneous anger of students against the rotten system, but without a coherent political programme or a genuine alternative to the fascist BJP-RSS, such liberal expressions of protest inevitably fail to challenge the system in any meaningful way. The recent targeting of educator Khan Sir after he became increasingly vocal against examination scams further shows how even slight criticism is met with state repression, while a Class 12 student, Vedant Shrivastava, was branded a “Pakistani” by the mainstream media simply for exposing serious irregularities in CBSE’s On-Screen Marking system. Student politics is portrayed as an obstacle to educational excellence.
Student politics is portrayed as an obstacle to educational excellence. What the university authorities demand is an ‘apolitical campus’, which is itself political, seeking to suppress collective organisation and dissent that challenge the ruling class politics.
“Our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture.” (Handling Contradictions Among the People) Comrade Mao Tse-tung correctly said. The education crisis in India can’t be solved solely through reforms. Stricter anti-paper leak laws, revised textbooks, changes in examination patterns or new regulatory bodies may temporarily address certain symptoms, but they cannot solve the fundamental problem. Because the education system is not malfunctioning, it is functioning exactly as the ruling classes want it to. An education system built within a society stipped in extreme exploitation, inequality and subordinate to the interests of imperialism will inevitably reproduce those very conditions. Its purpose is not to liberate human potential but to produce disciplined workers, obedient citizens and politically manageable subjects while extracting enormous profits. This is why the struggle for education can’t be separated from the struggle to transform society itself.
Education can truly change only when the rotten socio-economic order that produces these crises is dismantled and replaced by a genuinely democratic society organised around the needs of the people rather than the interests of profit. Such an education must be scientific and people-centred. Its purpose should not be to create a reserve army of cheap labour for the market, but to help human beings develop to their fullest capacities and actively participate in transforming society. It must gradually overcome the man-made division between mental and physical labour that class society has historically created, where intellectual work is respected and manual labour is devalued and disproportionately imposed upon the oppressed sections of society. Theory and practice must go hand in hand, integrating learning with socially useful labour so that knowledge ceases to be an abstract commodity and becomes a collective tool for social transformation. Instead of reducing students to competitors trapped in an endless race for scarce opportunities, education must nurture curiosity, creativity, collective responsibility and the ability to think critically. Ultimately, the question of education is inseparable from the question of what kind of society we wish to build, because as long as exploitation remains the foundation of social life, education too will remain a tool of exploitation. A truly emancipatory education can emerge only in a society in which knowledge is created by the people, shared among the people and mobilised in the service of their collective liberation.
