There was a time in Nehruvian India when the poor had faith in a simple yet revolutionary idea: ‘Padh jaayenge, toh badh jaayenge’. Education was the great leveller. It was the escape route out of caste, out of poverty, out of the inherited disadvantages of birth. Education was enshrined in the Constitution as a promise to India’s most poor and disadvantaged citizens.

Public universities, the IITs, the IIMs, government medical colleges were not merely institutions; they were the physical architecture of social mobility.

But the faith India’s poor and excluded had in education is faltering. And it’s not by accident but the consequence of a policy drift.

What began as creeping privatisation two decades ago has been deliberately accelerated under 12 years of BJP rule, turning it into a strategy designed to price education out of the reach of the poor. Coupled with stagnant salaries, the cost of education is leading to worsening poverty.

The entry of private capital into higher education began in the late 1990s and accelerated through the 2000s. It was propelled by the experience of underperforming and crumbling public universities. The infusion of private capital, it was believed, would bring both quality and greater access. But the experience of the past three decades has proven the folly of those expectations.

India’s higher education system is the third largest in the world by enrolment. We have 43 million students in over 60,000 colleges and 1,200 universities. These numbers underline the monumental wasted potential.

A country that aspires to be a knowledge superpower is producing graduates who can’t find jobs and innovators who fail the test of commercial application. It is re-engineering education in a way that dulls critical faculties and equates success with the ability to crack multiple-choice tests.

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