Topic Education

A child can be sitting in a classroom, listening carefully to the teacher and still miss the lesson—not because the concept is beyond the child’s ability, but because the language carrying that concept is unfamiliar. This creates a problem that…

Language policy in India becomes difficult not when the Constitution recognises linguistic diversity, but when a policy that appears flexible on paper meets governments that have different ideas about what that flexibility should mean. The current dispute between the Union…

A university can give a student more academic options without giving that student much more practical freedom. The distinction becomes visible only when a student tries to use those options. A prospectus may offer multidisciplinary study, minors, electives, flexible credits…

A mathematics classroom should be one of the easiest places to separate cultural pride from political argument. The subject appears almost perfectly universal: a proof either works or it does not; an equation does not change its truth because it…

A student can enter school and still find that the system becomes harder to navigate as education progresses. That sounds like a contradiction. If the law recognises a child’s right to education, and if schools are increasingly expected to include…

A child can have a legal right to free education and still grow up in a household that spends substantial amounts of money on schooling. There is no contradiction in that statement. The Right to Education framework guarantees free and…

India’s gender gap in education has changed in a way that would have been difficult to imagine a few decades ago. Women are entering higher education in large numbers. In several measures, they are now ahead of men. But educational…

A university can broaden access without necessarily changing the experience students encounter once they arrive. That is the harder part of India’s education story. Over the past decade, the presence of historically disadvantaged communities in higher education has expanded considerably.…

A child can attend a government school without paying a conventional school fee. That does not mean education costs the family nothing. There may be expenditure on tuition, transport, books, digital access or other forms of academic support. And if…

India’s competitive examinations are often discussed as tests of academic ability. But their significance cannot be understood from the question paper alone. The stakes become much clearer when the number of people seeking an opportunity is far greater than the…