Anuradha Rao

India’s war on coaching centres is being fought everywhere except where it matters most. In June 2025, the Ministry of Education constituted a high-level committee to examine students’ growing dependence on coaching centres and to recommend measures to reduce it. The MoE’s order is unusually candid in its diagnosis. It acknowledges that Indian schools are not building critical thinking or analytical depth, that rote learning continues to dominate classrooms, that formative assessment remains...

A country that enforces rest for pilots still relies on endurance from teachers to keep its education system airborne. AI generated image I was a student at the University of Mumbai in the late 80s, right in the middle of that unforgettable 54-day teachers’ strike of 1987. Technically, the situation should have been disastrous. The government was dragging its feet on implementing revised NEP-linked pay scales, negotiations were going nowhere, and the newspapers were full of ominous headlines....

As household agency turns into electoral agency, women are redefining what Indian politics must answer to. I grew up watching a pattern in my home. Every birthday or festival, my father would bring my mother a saree or a gift something he believed she would like. And without fail, she would wince. Not because she disliked the gift, but because she had never been asked. Her choice had been assumed for her. For years, she let it pass because life was full of bigger battles. When a woman is...