Six years after India tore up a 34-year-old education framework, classrooms look genuinely different — but the policy’s own funding target, learning deadline, and language formula remain unresolved.
On July 29, 2020, the Union cabinet approved the National Education Policy 2020, based on recommendations from the Kasturirangan Committee, replacing a policy that has, for the past 34 years, defined how children are taught. It’s the most radical overhaul of Indian education in three decades. As it turns six, the policy has rewritten how children are promoted through school, how the mark sheet defines a child, and the duration of a degree in a university. The policy missed its fundamental learning-target deadline by six years; it is about a third short of the promised fund allocation, and it has sparked an all-out battle between the Centre and Tamil Nadu over the role of language in the classroom. It is an apt occasion, thus, to bifurcate reality from promises – exactly where the classroom is after six long years and where it still has to come.
REWIRING THE CLASSROOM
The most visible shift is structural. The old 10+2 system has given way to a 5+3+3+4 structure spanning foundational, preparatory, middle, and secondary stages, formally folding three years of pre-school into the school system for the first time. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 has reshaped NCERT textbooks around competency rather than content coverage, and a new national assessment body, PARAKH, is pushing schools toward holistic report cards that track applied skills alongside marks. However, its scope will be constrained by the availability of teachers qualified to implement this reform. NISHTHA, the flagship in-service teacher training program designed to facilitate this transition, has trained over four lakh teachers and school heads by 2025.
Already, vocational exposure is beginning as early as Class 6; toy-based learning kits are now common in government school classrooms for the primary grades, and, wherever feasible, primary schools and Anganwadis have been set up on the same premises to make it easier for children to shift. That said, actual uptake remains uneven from state to state.
What Has changed in Six Years?
NEP 2020 declared that ensuring foundational literacy and numeracy for all is “our highest priority,” with a target for 2025; the government’s own NIPUN Bharat mission has subsequently shifted the target to 2026-27. India’s biggest rural learning survey, the 2024 Annual Status of Education Report, revealed modest but definite improvement: the share of Class 3 children who can read a Class 2 text is 23.4 percent, up from 16.3 percent in 2022 (the highest ever recorded since ASERs began in 2005). In terms of subtraction, the share of Class 3 students who can perform at a Class 2 level has increased from 25.9 percent to 33.7 percent.
Government schools are responsible for the bulk of this increased share, thus closing a gap that had long persisted with private schools, with states that were early movers like Uttar Pradesh showing double-digit gains in both subjects in the two years mentioned above. Yet many of the class 3 children in the villages are still unable to read texts below their actual grade levels, and the inequality of learning gains between states is such that a national average cannot disguise the under-provision for many. student, while the global average tends towards 1 percent and while economies comparable to the size of middle income and growing economics like Brazil (0.8%), Indonesia (1%), and Vietnam (1.5%) are spending comparable amounts of more money while demonstrating learning outcome that even surpassed India’s despite tighter constraints.
FLEXIBLE ON PAPER, NOT IN PRACTICE
The one domain likely to have embraced structural reforms of the NEP the soonest is higher education. 170 universities have already introduced the National Credit Framework; more than 2,469 universities are now listed under the Academic Bank of Credits, while 153 universities allow multiple points of entry and exit; and the government’s own SWAYAM platform already hosts more than 18,580 courses with 6.1 crore enrolments. Gross Enrolment Ratio is up from 23.7% to 30% between 2014-15. Enrollment among the SCs and STs has increased from 15.3%, 13.6%, and 19% for the respective categories of institutions to 27.8% and 22.8%, respectively. This progress is important, but the 50% GER target remains set for 2035.
What the policy clearly hasn’t delivered yet is the single Higher Education Commission of India intended to replace the UGC and the AICTE; “We do not have this promised regulator yet. Legislation is pending for this,” says Poornima Gupta, programme director, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon. “And despite the national credit and academic banks, it is still quite hard to transfer credits as courses and assessment models vary vastly,” adds Purani, Vice Chancellor, Prestige University, Indore. As Purani summarizes: “The new curriculum frameworks, the credit frameworks – that adoption may have happened fairly quickly, but far fewer universities have reformed how students learn or how teachers teach.” Purani says the next step should incentivise universities to pursue autonomy and outcome-focused education rather than simply complying with regulations.
A FORMULA STILL DEBATED
The three-language formula, which mandates that a student learn three languages, with at least two being native Indian languages, and gives states the choice to select one, has proved the most potent combustible ever produced. Though Tamil Nadu is among the many states that have pursued a two-language policy for decades and declined to adopt the three-language policy, the Centre decided to deny the state around Rs 2,152 crore under the Samagra Shiksha scheme for its failure to implement the corresponding PM SHRI scheme. The row blew further in the year 2026 as the CBSE once again “reaffirmed that R3 shall be compulsory from class VI in all CBSE schools from 2026- 2027.” This once again increased concern among many non-Hindi-speaking states that the word ‘discretion’ in writing could be used as a tool to impose Hindi.
WHAT REMAINS IS THE ACCESS GAP
But quietly below the debates, there is a harder equity story. For, while more than 70 percent of
the kids in the cities of urban India got internet (in UDISE+ data), just about 35 to 40 percent
of households in rural India did; which means several of the government’s own digital learning
aids for those requiring remediation are denied to most children who need them the most, and
vacancies are most difficult to plug where rural schools’ learning deficits are highest. After
six years on the job, NEP 2020 has certainly delivered a shift in the vocabulary, structure,
and philosophy of assessment that informs what India is meant to consider Indian education,
if not yet in the learning and outcomes in the average rural government classroom. That’s
the query for NEP’s next six years.
Clear Cut Education Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: September 20, 2026 22:30 IST
Written By: Yatharth Pathak
