India’s Longest Layover: Why Education Reform Remains Grounded

A country that enforces rest for pilots still relies on endurance from teachers to keep its education system airborne.

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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. But my most explicit memory from those months has nothing to do with disruption. It has everything to do with what happened after the dharnas ended for the day.

After hours, our teachers quietly turned their homes into classrooms. Some lived in tiny one-bedroom apartments where you had to move a pressure cooker, two stools, one flower pot, and a mildly confused family cat before you could find a place to sit. Others had roomy drawing rooms with sofas that Chaucer himself would have approved. Some served full meals, some offered only tea, biscuits, and sincere apologies. But the teaching never stopped. Shakespeare was taught sitting on a diwan. Chaucer was decoded at a dining table. Milton was discussed on a balcony facing a busy Mumbai street.

Their protest was against the state, not against the students. They were fighting for their rights, but we never once paid the price. It was an extraordinary demonstration of quiet professionalism - something that has stayed with me for nearly four decades.

The 1987 strike was part of a longer pattern of periodic eruptions of protest in a system chronically slow to honour its own commitments. From the Kothari Commission’s unfulfilled promise of teachers as ‘nation-builders’ in the 1960s to repeated delays in pay revisions across states, India has long depended on educator restraint to paper over policy drift.

The memory of that strike resurfaced sharply over the past few days as India watched two very different headlines dominate the news cycle: the Indigo airline meltdown and Telangana’s newly enacted Right to Disconnect.

Unequal Compliance

Indigo’s crisis, as the DGCA dryly pointed out, was essentially a compliance failure. The airline simply ran out of time to meet mandated rest norms for its crew. And when pilots do not get enough rest, the nation does not encourage sacrifice. It enforces compliance. Immediately.

But this country behaves very differently when the people in question are teachers. Consistent training is non-negotiable for pilots but entirely optional for teachers. Mandatory rest is a safety requirement for pilots but a ‘luxury’ for educators. Compliance failures in aviation cause national uproar; compliance failures in education merely cause a circular requesting “adjustments.”

The contrast is absurd if you pause to think about it. One headline triggers government intervention. The other triggers collective silence. This is India’s policy algorithm: the more revenue-generating the sector, the higher the urgency; the more nation-building the sector, the lower the attention.

And then came Indigo’s other parallel - the one we all experienced. When Indigo couldn’t handle its workload, it simply passed the chaos to different airlines and the passengers. Other carriers made money, passengers were involuntarily enrolled in a masterclass in “waiting and patience management,” and social media became a therapeutic outlet.

Here is a refined extension with concrete, recognisable examples, kept subtle and observational in The Economist’s prose—no melodrama, just accumulation:

Education works precisely the same way. When a teacher resigns, falls ill or goes on leave, the workload is instantly redistributed. There is no media headline and no regulatory scrutiny. Far less any ‘national apology.’ Just an expectation that everyone will ‘adjust.’ If one teacher leaves, the rest silently stretch. If five leave, they stretch further. And because teachers have been stretching for decades, the system sees no reason to change. It assumes they will make it work because they always have.

In government schools, this often means a mathematics teacher taking on social science, or a science instructor managing two grades in the same classroom. In colleges, guest faculty are asked to cover entire semesters at short notice, paid by the lecture, with no security and little support. In universities, vacant posts remain unfilled for years, while senior professors quietly absorb extra supervision, examinations and administrative work. None of this is treated as failure. It is normalised as ‘flexibility.’ Over time, what began as an emergency measure has now hardened into operating principle.

In a way, India has become a long-term participant in a masterclass on “waiting for changes in education.” Waiting for teacher-training reforms, waiting for workload norms, waiting for autonomy, waiting for modernisation, waiting for support systems, waiting for budgets - always waiting.

Budget Blindness

Which brings me to February next year. A few months from now, the nation will sit down to watch the annual Budget, hoping that this year, education will receive more than a token mention. Hoping that this might be the moment when we stop treating education as a footnote and start treating it as infrastructure. As I have written before, education ideally deserves a separate, standalone budget, much as the Railways once did when the state recognised that some systems are too foundational to be buried in aggregate accounts. Learning is not a ‘sector’ competing for allocations but an ecosystem that supplies skilled labour, institutional memory and civic capacity to every other sector.

But even if that dream remains distant, the least we can expect is an acknowledgement that India’s education system cannot run on teacher goodwill forever. Goodwill is not a governance model. Sacrifice is not a sustainability plan. A sector that produces every engineer, doctor, scientist, pilot, policymaker and lawmaker cannot be managed like a charitable trust hoping that people will ‘do the right thing.’

If Indigo’s crisis taught us anything, it is that compliance matters even to the most powerful private airlines. If Telangana’s Right to Disconnect taught us anything, it is that governments can intervene swiftly when employee well-being becomes a serious economic concern. So why is teacher well-being treated as a sentimental issue instead of a compliance issue? Why do we have rest norms for pilots but none for teachers? Why do we track pilot training hours down to the minute but cannot enforce structured, meaningful teacher development across states?

The truth is plain: India protects sectors that drive revenue. It hopes that sectors that drive learning will survive on moral strength. But here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. A tired pilot can crash a plane. A tired teacher can crash a generation. The consequences of one are immediate and visible. The consequences of the other are slow, silent, and permanent.

As February 2026 approaches and Budget discussions begin, I hope the nation remembers that teachers are not invisible infrastructure. They are the system. They are the engines. They are the unacknowledged backbone of compliance for every future workforce.

The pilots of the future will be shaped by the teachers of today. And that alone should be reason enough for India to stop waiting finally.

(The writer is a learning and development professional. Views personal.)