Anuradha Rao

The enduring weakness of India’s education policy lies not in reform design, but in the absence of an organised constituency that turns learning into leverage. A longtime reader once told me my writing on education was “good writing” but “idealistic.” I was irritated at the time. How can education, the one subject every parent worries about, be called idealistic? But two recent editions of India Today forced me to reconsider. A January commemorative issue arranged the country’s past across...

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....