What Haunt Indian Education System Today, Sonia Gandhi Writes

NEP 2020: Congress leader and Chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) Sonia Gandhi has published an opinion piece criticising the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in The Hindu on Monday (March 31) and is going viral on social media.

In the piece titled “The ‘3Cs’ that haunt Indian education today”, Gandhi argues that the Central government is “profoundly indifferent” to the education of India’s children and youth, and is concerned only with the implementation of three things- the centralisation of power with the Union Government; the commercialisation and outsourcing of investments in education to the private sector, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions.

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Centralisation

The disastrous impact of unrestrained centralisation of the government is witnessed in the field of education, Congress leader claims. The Central Advisory Board of Education (CBSE), comprising Ministers for Education in both the Union and State Governments has not been convened since September 2019 and while planning to implement such a radical change in education through the NEP 2020, the Union Government has not even consulted with the State governments once. “It is a testament to the Government’s singular determination not to heed any voice other than its own, even on a subject that is squarely in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution,” she argues.

She also mentions about the “bullying tendency” wherein the Central government forced the State governments to implement the PM-SHRI (or PM Schools for Rising India) scheme of model schools by holding back the grants due to them under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) as a hold.

In the field of higher education as well, the government has brought in the “draconian draft” – University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines of 2025, through which it has fully written out State governments from the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in universities established, funded, and operated by them. As UGC draft guidelines revises plans where it empowers Chancellors to constitute search committees for the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in the State universities, the Union Governmenet has given itself a “near-monopoly power” in this regard, Gandhi observes. “This is a backdoor attempt to convert a subject in the Concurrent List into the sole preserve of the Union Government and represents one of the gravest threats to federalism in today’s times,” shed adds.

Commercialisation

Then, Gandhi writes about the Modi government’s commercialisation of the education system. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act which provided key safeguards to ensure accessibility of primary schools for all Indian children through neighbourhood schools, the NEP seeks to overturn the concept by introducing school complexes. These school complexes resulted in the large-scale shutdown of public schooling and unchecked privatisation of school education, Congress leader argues.

“Since 2014, we have seen the closure and consolidation of 89,441 public schools across the country — and the establishment of 42,944 additional private schools. The country’s poor have been forced out of public education, and into the hands of a prohibitively expensive and under-regulated private school system,” she writes.

Similarly, the increasing prevalence of corruption in our education systems is a manifestation of this commercialisation.

Communalisation 

The Central government’s third drive is on communalisation, instructing and propagating hatred through the education system. “Textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the backbone of the school curriculum, have been revised with the intention of sanitising Indian history,” Gandhi states.

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Aside from this, hiring of professors in the universities, the large-scale hiring of professors from “regime-friendly ideologically backgrounds, no matter the comically poor quality of their teaching and scholarships”. The UGC’s attempts to dilute qualifications for top positions in prestigious instiuitons is a tactic to enable the rush of academicians who are driven by ideological considerations rather than academic interests.

“Over the last decade, our education systems have been systematically cleansed of the spirit of public service and education policy has been sanitised of any concerns about access to and the quality of education,” Gandhi writes.

This slaughter of India’s public education system must end, Congress leader writes in the conclusion.