Anuradha Rao

Consider three children. All are six years old. All attend Class I classrooms in the same city. All are equally entitled, under Article 21A of the Constitution, to free and compulsory education. But that is where equality ends. The first child attends a government school. The teacher standing in front of the class was required, by law, to pass the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) - a benchmark designed to assess whether they understand how children learn, how classrooms function, and how...

Cinema ceases to interpret reality when it begins to shape how that reality is understood. There is a reason history is easier to watch. Even when it is selective, dramatised, or quietly biased, history comes with distance. It allows us to engage without feeling implicated. We can question it, critique it, even reject it - but we are not inside it. The present offers no such comfort. When cinema focuses on the present, it ceases to be a secure narrative space. It starts shaping how we...

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...