6 min readJun 7, 2026 03:59 PM IST
First published on: Jun 7, 2026 at 06:11 AM IST
It is astonishing that it has become fashionable to talk about education. For the wrong reasons maybe, but at least we are discussing the most undiscussed and, in my view, the most vital reform that India needs. So far, all talk has been about NEET and leaked papers and the venality that has been revealed in the CBSE exam system. Desperate young students have been driven to suicide because of these corrupt practices. This alone should shame those responsible. So, when the noise and drama of these events die, please, please let us continue talking about the rot in our education system.
Maybe this time we will talk about it a little longer because of India’s newest political party making leaked pa pers their first cause. By the time you read this, the leader of the Cockroach Janata Party should have landed in Delhi and probably been arrested before he manages to hold a protest rally at Jantar Mantar. It is my fervent hope that even if the protest fails, the cause that he claims has brought him back home will not be forgotten. There must be accountability and heads must roll. He has demanded the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, and if this man had any self-respect, he would have already resigned, but this will solve nothing.
The rot goes deep and has spread from the top to the very bottom. The reason why our political leaders and high officials never send their children to government schools is because they know that they have built schools that offer not real learning but barest literacy. When Indian children from Tamil Nadu and Himachal competed in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2009, they came second last. In this exam, 15-year-olds were tested for their skills in reading, mathematics and science. Alarm bells should have gone off across India but if our babus have one superpower, it is knowing how to keep bad news from reaching the ears of their political masters.
We did not need an international test to establish that schools run by the Indian state are abysmal. If our prime ministers have had one thing in common, it is their neglect of education. Jawaharlal Nehru built the IITs but appeared not to notice that the only children able to get into them were from upper caste, middle class families. He also did not notice that on his watch was created a higher education system that was so tightly controlled by the government that it killed all chances of excellence or research. One reason is meddlesome officials. If there is to be reform, then it should start with the abolition of the University Grants Commission. It is an unneeded busybody that gives officials unneeded power.
Before writing this piece, I had a chat with Michel Danino who knows from the inside how the system works. He worked in the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and recently got into trouble with the Supreme Court for telling the truth about corruption in the judiciary in a school textbook. When I asked him what were the three most important reforms that needed to be made in the school system, he said that for a start, instead of students being treated as a ‘passive sponge’, they need to be encouraged to participate. In other words, less rote learning.
The second reform he recommends is the setting up of proper teacher training institutes. And third, that there be investment in school infrastructure. Government schools lack such basic things as libraries, playgrounds, clean water and toilets. I have visited village schools in many states and seen some that are just empty sheds. So, I could not agree more. The irony is that the one reform that has been made is for teachers to be paid hefty salaries. These are sometimes ten times higher than the paltry salaries teachers earn in the thousands of private schools that have sprouted across rural India.
It is heartbreaking to think of how disadvantaged Indian children will be when they go out into a world where the competition could be AI children. Already, we have ‘graduates’ who cannot find jobs because they have left college without being able to articulate an idea or solve a simple equation. It has been said more than once that the problem in India is not unemployment but unemployability.
In 2013, when I was a passionate Modi-bhakt and hoped with all my heart that he would be able to bring the changes India so desperately needs, I was once summoned to meet him. He was still Chief Minister of Gujarat but knew in his heart that when the general election came the following year, he would be prime minister. He asked me what I felt were the things that most urgently needed to be done. And, I said he needed to rectify the mistakes that Congress prime ministers had made, which was to neglect education and healthcare.
We talked uninterrupted for more than an hour at the end, of which I was convinced that I had made my point. Clearly, I had not or by now we should have seen a revolutionary improvement in government schools that are in states governed by BJP chief ministers. Today that includes all major Hindi-belt states, Maharashtra and now West Bengal. Will the Cockroach noises bring some urgency? It is my sincerest hope that this will happen.
The exam was first conducted on May 3, and days after the exam, it was cancelled as the allegedly the paper got leak. 
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