Some Children Are More Equal Than Others

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 knowledge is transmitted.

The second child studies in a school run by a religious trust. Here, that requirement simply does not exist. The law does not apply. The third attends a private English-medium school. On paper, the law applies. In practice, it is rarely enforced. And even when violations are found, consequences are almost non-existent.

Here we have three entirely different standards for the person shaping their first learning experience and one Constitution, which promises equality to all three.

Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. But what does equality mean if the most basic condition of education, which is the quality of a teacher, depends not on the child, but on the type of institution they happen to be enrolled in?

To understand the absurdity, consider how we treat other professions. A surgeon cannot operate without a license. A lawyer cannot appear in court without clearing the bar. A chartered accountant cannot sign an audit without certification. In each case, the qualification belongs to the individual and not to the institution that employs them. Likewise, no private hospital can decide that licensing is optional and no law firm can claim exemption from professional standards. Because the person being protected has no way of independently verifying competence.

Low Professional Standards

The same logic should apply, even more strongly, to a child. The TET was intended to serve as that baseline. It was introduced to ensure that every child, regardless of where they study, is taught by someone who meets a minimum standard of professional competence.

Instead, we have created a system where this minimum standard is unevenly applied, inconsistently enforced, and, in some cases, entirely absent.

This unevenness was judicially sanctioned. In Pramati Educational and Cultural Trust v. Union of India (2014), the Supreme Court held that the Right to Education Act does not apply to minority educational institutions. In a single judgment, children in minority institutions were effectively excluded from the protective framework of the RTE Act, thus losing not only admission-related provisions but also basic quality safeguards, including teacher qualification norms. The intent was to protect minority rights. The consequence was the creation of a category of children for whom the State’s obligation to ensure minimum educational standards simply does not apply.

And then we look at the numbers. In the most recent Central Teacher Eligibility Test, only about 25.68 percent of candidates qualified overall. It is tempting to read this as a story about failing teachers. But it is, in fact, a story about a system that has not invested in them. Because the real question is not just how many teachers pass the test.

The real question is: how much has the State and the broader education system invested in preparing them to pass it? What does teacher training look like in India today? How rigorous are our B.Ed. programmes? How much continuous professional development do teachers actually receive once they enter classrooms? Where is the institutional commitment to pedagogy as a craft that must be built, refined, and supported?

Systemic Neglect

When nearly three out of four aspiring teachers cannot clear a minimum eligibility benchmark, it reflects systemic neglect at scale. The 25 percent becomes a statistic about investment. Yet, even this fragile benchmark is not applied uniformly to all children.

The situation raises a question the system has no clear answer to. If only a quarter of aspiring teachers qualify, and millions of children need teachers today and not in some ideal future, what happens next? Do we lower the bar to fill vacancies? Do we continue appointing underprepared teachers and hope classrooms compensate for what training did not provide? Or do we urgently and seriously invest in fixing the pipeline by strengthening teacher education, redesigning training, and embedding continuous professional development across the system? The silence on this is telling, because acknowledging the problem would require confronting the scale of neglect that created it.

Which brings us back to equality. The Constitution does not say that some children deserve qualified teachers while others do not. It does not say that rights change based on whether a school is government-run, minority-run, or privately funded. And yet, that is precisely how the system operates.

For one child, the right to education includes the right to a qualified teacher. For another, that right is legally diluted. For a third, it exists only on paper. This is not inequality of outcome. This is an inequality of protection.

The deeper tragedy is not that this contradiction exists. It is that it has been normalised.

Governments across political lines have avoided confronting it. Courts have acknowledged the problem, but the structure remains intact. Society, for the most part, has looked away because the children most affected by weak enforcement are not the ones who shape public discourse. And so, the system persists. We often speak of education as the great equaliser. But an equaliser cannot function if its foundations are unequal.

If the child sitting in one classroom is guaranteed a trained teacher, while another is not, then the promise of equality is already broken long before outcomes are measured and futures are decided.

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