The argument we are not having
India is fighting bitterly over what its children are taught, and barely at all over whether they can read. Both problems are real. Only one of them is an emergency.
Somewhere in a village classroom this morning, a nine-year-old opened a textbook she cannot read. She is in Class 3. The book in front of her is pitched at Class 2. She is not unusual, and she is not an anecdote. According to the Annual Status of Education Report, the most rigorous independent measurement India possesses, she represents the majority of her cohort.
That figure has barely moved in a decade. In 2012, 21.4 per cent of Class 3 children in rural India could read a Class 2 text. In 2018 it reached 27.5 per cent. By 2022 it had collapsed to 20.5 per cent — below where it stood ten years earlier. The 2024 survey recorded the strongest recovery since the pandemic, credited to the government's foundational literacy mission, and it deserves the credit. But the recovery restored a baseline that was never acceptable to begin with. By the time these children reach eighteen, more than a quarter still cannot read that same Class 2 passage, 42.7 per cent cannot read a simple English sentence, and 56.7 per cent cannot perform basic division.
We are, meanwhile, in the middle of a furious national argument about the adjectives applied to Babur.
That argument is not frivolous, and this newspaper does not intend to dismiss it. But the proportions of our public attention have come loose from the proportions of the problem, and it is worth saying so plainly before saying anything else.
What has been achieved
Begin with the credit, because the failures make no sense without it.
India educates 233 million school students. In 2024–25, for the first time in the history of national school data, the country crossed one crore teachers. Dropout rates fell sharply at every stage — secondary from 10.9 per cent to 8.2 per cent in a single year. Zero-enrolment schools declined by nearly 38 per cent. Higher education enrolment reached 4.5 crore, and the enrolment ratio for Scheduled Caste students climbed from 18.9 to 27.8 in a decade, for Scheduled Tribe students from 13.5 to 22.8. Women now enrol at a higher rate than men.
This is one of the largest expansions of educational access in human history, and it was achieved across successive governments of different persuasions. The question of access is substantially settled. The question is what happens after the child is inside the building.
What happens inside
Consider two facts drawn from the same government dataset in the same year. Roughly 40 lakh students were being taught in about 1.11 lakh single-teacher schools — one adult, every grade, every subject. At the same moment, 31,981 teachers were drawing salaries in 12,964 schools that had no students at all.
Both numbers improved the following year, and that improvement is real. But their coexistence tells us something that no amount of recruitment will fix. India does not have a teacher shortage. It has a deployment collapse, sustained because transfers and postings function as patronage in most states. Jharkhand runs a higher-secondary pupil-teacher ratio of 47 while Chhattisgarh runs 12. The national average, which sits comfortably inside policy norms, conceals both.
Behind the deployment failure sits a pipeline failure that has been documented since the Justice Verma Commission reported in 2012 and has never been seriously confronted: teacher-training colleges that do not teach, district training institutes that function as parking posts, cascade workshops evaluated against nothing, a permanent underclass of contract teachers, and regular teachers pulled off instruction for elections, censuses and data entry.
And behind that sits money. The Kothari Commission recommended six per cent of national income for education in 1964. The National Policy on Education repeated it in 1986. The National Education Policy repeated it again in 2020. Combined central and state spending stands at roughly 2.7 per cent of GDP. This year's Union allocation of ₹1.39 lakh crore was announced as a record, and in nominal terms it is. It also amounts to about 0.36 per cent of GDP, 2.6 per cent of the Union budget — down from around three per cent in 2019–20 — with school education growing at 6.35 per cent against inflation of five to six. A record, in real terms, that stands still.
The other argument
None of this excuses what has happened to the curriculum, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Since 2022, a substantial body of content has left India's national textbooks. The 2002 Gujarat riots. Material on Gandhi's assassination and the ban on the RSS that followed it. The Emergency. Two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from a chapter on communalism. A Class 10 chapter on democracy and social division by caste and race. Chapters on popular struggles and challenges to democracy. Mughal court history. Political cartoons.
The stated reason was pandemic learning-loss and overlap with other classes. For some of it, that holds. For the Gujarat riots, the RSS ban and the Faiz poems, it does not — there is no other class in which that material appears. And the fact that certain deletions were not notified at all, a decision the council later explained as an attempt to avoid confusion, is the single hardest thing for its defenders to explain. Unannounced deletion is the precise opposite of transparent curriculum governance.
The new textbooks written under the 2023 curriculum framework go further, and here the assessment must be careful. The Class 8 volume describes Babur as a ruthless conqueror who erected towers of skulls, Akbar's reign as a blend of brutality and tolerance including thirty thousand killed at Chittorgarh, and Aurangzeb as a destroyer of temples and gurdwaras. Every one of those claims is defensible. Babur's own memoirs record the towers. Chittorgarh happened. The older textbooks' untroubled "Akbar the Great" was itself a simplification, and serious historians outside the political right have said so.
The problem is not accuracy. It is asymmetry. The same volume treats the Marathas and the Sikhs as narratives of resistance. Maratha raids in Bengal, Vijayanagara's conquests, Chola temple destruction — none receive comparable scrutiny. Applying an unflinching lens to one dynasty and a reverent one to the others is not unsanitised history. It is a differently sanitised history, and a disclaimer at the front of the chapter telling thirteen-year-olds that nobody today bears responsibility does not undo what the chapter does.
What is happening is best described not as brainwashing — a word that flatters the accuser more than it describes the act — but as curriculum capture: the use of a state monopoly on textbooks to shift the frame of national memory. That charge is narrower, it is documented, and it is far harder to rebut.
Why the fix cannot be partisan
Here is the part that both sides of this argument would prefer to skip.
In 1977, the Janata government tried to withdraw NCERT textbooks by Romila Thapar and Bipan Chandra as anti-national. Between 1998 and 2004, the first NDA government rewrote them, and the University Grants Commission invited universities to offer courses in Vedic astrology — the origin of the astrology degrees that still embarrass Indian higher education today. Between 2004 and 2014, the UPA reversed the whole thing. The replacement books were better by most pedagogical measures; the mechanism was identical. Kerala withdrew a Class 7 chapter under public pressure in 2008 and its curriculum reflects Left historiography with the same confidence that the national curriculum now reflects another. Karnataka reversed its textbooks with a change of government in 2023.
Every party has captured the curriculum when it held office and objected loudly when it did not. The vulnerability is structural: the council's head is a government appointment, its curriculum committees are ministry-constituted, there is no statutory consultation, no mandatory disclosure of what has been cut, no independent scientific or historical review with power to say no, and no revision cycle insulated from the electoral one.
A reform that merely deletes this government's content and restores the last one's will be reversed again in 2029 or 2034. What India needs is a statutory, independent curriculum authority — staggered fixed terms so no single government appoints a majority, formal representation for opposition-ruled states, a mandatory public comment period, a published change log recording every deletion with its reason, and review boards empowered to veto content that contradicts the scientific or documentary record. It should be argued for, honestly, as protection against whoever governs next. That is its only realistic path to cross-party support.
The children who are not parties to the dispute
One last matter, and it is the least defensible thing in Indian school education today.
The Union government has tied the release of Samagra Shiksha funds — the core money that runs government schools — to states signing up for a separate scheme. Tamil Nadu is owed more than ₹3,500 crore across two years and went to the Supreme Court. Kerala reports ₹953 crore withheld and some 40 lakh students from marginalised communities affected. As of early 2025, three states had received nothing at all. Punjab refused, then signed under fiscal pressure.
Set aside entirely the merits of the three-language formula, on which reasonable people differ and will continue to. A general-purpose entitlement is being used as leverage to compel adoption of a discretionary programme. The children losing teaching materials and inclusive-education support in Chennai and Kozhikode did not choose a side in this quarrel. It is also self-defeating: it converts a policy containing genuinely good ideas into a symbol of coercion, guaranteeing resistance in precisely those states with the strongest public school systems.
The verdict
Restore evolution and the periodic table to Class 10, because most Indian children never reach the classes where they were relocated, and a nation cannot claim scientific temper while withholding the organising theory of biology from the majority of its citizens. Apply one evidentiary standard to every dynasty. Build the independent curriculum authority. Fund the foundational literacy mission as though the future depended on it, because it does.
And then have the argument about Babur. It is a legitimate argument, and it deserves to be had properly, in the open, before a body that cannot simply be reconstituted after the next election.
But have it in a country where the children in the room can read.
This editorial draws on ASER 2022–2024, UDISE+ 2024–25, AISHE 2023–24, the Union Budget 2026–27, NCERT curriculum documents and the National Curriculum Framework 2023, and parliamentary replies of the Ministry of Education.