The Challenges for India’s Education System

Summary

This paper by Chatham House, was the first in an occasional series on India’s education system, places the current issues facing education in India in a historical context. Since Independence, successive Indian governments have had to address a number of key challenges with regard to education policy, which has always formed a crucial part of its development agenda. The key challenges are:
• improving access and quality at all levels of education;
• increasing funding, especially with regard to higher education;
• improving literacy rates.
Currently, while Indian institutes of management and technology are world-class, primary and secondary schools, particularly in rural areas, face severe challenges.

While new governments commonly pledge to increase spending on education and bring in structural reforms, this has rarely been delivered in practice. Most of the changes undertaken by the previous BJP-led government were aimed at reforming the national curricula, and have been criticized for attempting to ‘Hindu-ize’ India’s traditionally secular education system. Improving the standards of education in India will be a critical test for the current Congress-led government. It will need to resolve concerns over the content of the curriculum, as well as tackling the underlying challenges to education