Opinion For a successful digital revolution, India needs to fix the institutional neglect plaguing our school system

Smriti Irani, in her recent article titled “The creativity curriculum,” (IE, July, 28) built an ideal vision of India where every young person has the potential to be a creator; and numerous creativities such as storytelling, online teaching, and entrepreneurship can fulfil the vision of “Viksit Bharat” by 2047. Her emphasis on the idea of the creative economy is indeed a pressing need in contemporary India. The stories she cited — from regional YouTubers to climate-rap-artists — are inspiring. However, beneath such inspiring anecdotes lies a harsher reality: India’s educational systems and infrastructure are in severe crisis. To imagine a future for young generations built on creative capacity without acknowledging the material and digital foundations of our educational system is problematic.

Creativity needs classrooms with ceilings

The recent incident in Rajasthan, where the roof of a government primary school collapsed during morning prayers, starkly illustrates the most basic need of any educational institution: A safe classroom, which our government schools have yet to achieve. This is not an isolated incident. In rural and backward regions, many school buildings are in a state of decay. Separate toilets for girls are missing, and basic drinking water is unavailable. In such a state of infrastructural crisis, how can we expect our young minds to unleash creativity and develop design thinking skills?

The vision for Creative India, as pointed out by Irani, proposes “startup labs” and “maker spaces” beyond part-time and extracurricular activities. However, we have not yet ensured that every school has a functional science lab or a well-equipped library.

Irani’s central argument is that digital creators, coming from villages to slums, are taking India into a state of digital revolution. However, she did not address the issue of the digital divide in India. Drishya Thekkumbad, in her article “Digital Dreams, Divided Realities: Navigating Educational Access in India,” highlighted that “only 32.4 per cent of India’s 1.47 million schools have access to functional computers. Only 24.4 per cent have smart classrooms to aid teaching new-age skills.” She further argued that the disparity is worse in government and rurally located schools, where access to WiFi, computers, and other equipment lags compared to private and urban-centric schools. This stark digital gap leaves a large number of underprivileged students excluded from the benefits of online education, despite Irani’s confidence in “India’s development frontier with strong, inclusive opportunities.”

During the Covid pandemic, the image of students climbing to rooftops or travelling miles away from home to catch a signal to attend their classes is still vivid in our memories. If that is the criterion of digital infrastructure, I doubt that a young student from a government school located in a remote village of Bihar should be expected to produce digital portfolios, social-impact stories, or build entrepreneurial content for the wider mass.

New Education Policy: A framework that lacks criticality

While NEP indeed incorporates many good things, the practice of critical thinking seems to be on paper. We have seen how the textbooks of social sciences are being redesigned to cater to the ideological interests of the ruling establishment. The de-linking of creativity from criticality will be mere performance, not transformation.

If we want to build Viksit Bharat — I would prefer what B R Ambedkar says, “Prabuddha Bharat”, an enlightened India — we must inculcate critical pedagogy in our curriculum, foster a scientific temperament, and cultivate civic consciousness among our young generations. Instead, the current trajectory of education reform tends to reduce critical and creative learning to design projects and poster-making, while discouraging in-depth engagement with socio-political realities.

Irani’s vision for a creator-led India is appealing, but it seems to be incomplete. Creativity needs a strong foundation of public education, critical pedagogical methods, digital inclusion, and social justice. Educational institutions must have adequate infrastructure, well-trained and well-paid teachers, and policies that prioritise student input over imposing rules and regulations. The vision of “Viksit Bharat” must be based on the secular and scientific development of the young mind, and let’s be clear: The issue isn’t just about imagination, but also institutional neglect. No amount of storytelling can solve that.

The writer is a fellow at the faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Germany