The Second National Policy on Education (1986) and Its Revisions: Expanding Access and Quality

India in the mid-1980s was grappling with a deeply unequal education system – where children in remote tribal villages, girls in rural households, and students from Scheduled Caste communities had little or no reliable access to schooling. The Second National Policy on Education (NPE), introduced in May 1986 under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government, was a direct response to these realities. It placed equity, access, and quality at the centre of educational planning, and its subsequent revision through the Ramamurti Committee in 1990 added a crucial moral and cultural dimension to that vision.

The context behind the second NPE 🔗

Before 1986, India’s education system carried significant structural weaknesses – uneven school infrastructure, high dropout rates, gender gaps in enrollment, and a near-total absence of meaningful provisions for marginalized communities. A status report prepared by the Ministry of Education in 1985, titled Challenge of Education: A Policy Perspective, laid bare these gaps and triggered a nationwide debate. The 1986 policy, formulated under Rajiv Gandhi’s government, built upon the NPE of 1968 while addressing its shortcomings and responding to a rapidly changing national and global context – including technological advancement, rising urbanization, and growing demands for skilled human resources.

The policy established a 10+2+3 educational structure across the country, creating uniformity in how schooling was organized. More importantly, it framed education as a tool not just for academic learning, but for social transformation – one that had to actively correct inequalities rather than passively accommodate them.

Addressing disparities: Education for SC, ST, and women 🔗

The NPE 1986 placed a strong emphasis on removing educational disparities, particularly for Indian women, Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Scheduled Caste (SC) communities. This was not a general aspiration – the policy outlined concrete mechanisms to translate it into action.

Provisions for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes 🔗

The NPE emphasized that education must play a positive and interventionist role in correcting social and regional imbalances, empowering women, and securing a rightful place for the disadvantaged and minorities. For SC and ST communities specifically, this meant expanding scholarships, increasing recruitment of teachers from these communities, and developing new educational institutions in tribal and rural regions that had historically been underserved in terms of infrastructure and personnel.

The policy also introduced reservation provisions in educational institutions and recommended targeted programs for SC/ST students to ensure they were not simply enrolled but retained and supported through their education. Special incentives were offered to poor families – particularly those from marginalized communities – to encourage regular school attendance among children.

Education for women’s equality 🔗

Gender disparity in education was a critical concern in 1986. Girls, particularly in rural areas, had significantly lower enrollment rates – cultural biases, economic constraints, and safety concerns kept many of them out of school. The NPE addressed this directly by recommending the establishment of separate girls’ schools in areas where social norms prevented coeducation, mobilizing communities to promote female enrollment, and offering incentives such as free uniforms, textbooks, and attendance-based financial support to families below the poverty line.

The policy also called for adult education programs targeting women’s literacy – recognizing that illiterate mothers were statistically less likely to send their children to school. The government found that roughly 50% of India’s population remained illiterate at the time, and that a large share of this was concentrated among women and marginalized groups. Education for women, the policy made clear, was not simply about access – it was about empowerment.

Operation Blackboard: Getting the basics right 🔗

One of the most recognized and practically grounded initiatives of the NPE 1986 was Operation Blackboard, launched in the academic year 1987-88. The premise was straightforward: you cannot improve learning outcomes if schools lack the most fundamental infrastructure.

The Operation Blackboard scheme, formally initiated in 1987-88, aimed to address the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in primary schools, which was seen as a direct hindrance to quality elementary education. The scheme set minimum standards for every primary school – at least two weatherproof classrooms, two teachers (with at least one being a woman), separate toilets for girls and boys, and a basic set of teaching-learning aids including science kits, mathematics kits, charts, maps, and children’s books.

The main objectives of Operation Blackboard were to improve the quality of primary education, reduce waste and stagnation, and draw more students – particularly girls – into the primary education sector. Schools with an enrollment of over 100 students were eligible for a third teacher. The scheme was fully funded by the central government during the Plan period, removing the burden from cash-strapped state governments and local bodies.

The significance of Operation Blackboard goes beyond its logistical achievements. It represented a policy acknowledgment that the state had a non-negotiable obligation to provide functional schools – not just on paper, but in practice, even in the most remote corners of the country. From 1993-94, the scheme was extended to upper primary schools as well, further expanding its reach.

Open universities and distance learning: Expanding higher education 🔗

The NPE 1986 recognized that a significant portion of India’s population – working adults, people in remote areas, women with household responsibilities – could not access traditional degree-granting institutions. The answer the policy proposed was a robust open university system.

The policy expanded the open university system with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), which had been created in 1985. IGNOU was designed to offer flexible, correspondence-based higher education to students who could not attend regular colleges. The NPE gave it formal policy backing and envisaged a wider network of open and distance learning institutions at the state level as well.

The policy also called for the creation of Open Schools at the secondary level, to be established in a phased manner by 1990, with resource centres in each district. These resource centres were to be located in or linked to secondary teacher training institutions or District Institutes of Education – integrating open learning with teacher development infrastructure. This was a forward-thinking approach that anticipated the later expansion of distance education as a mainstream option.

The NPE also advocated for the rural university model, inspired by Gandhian philosophy, to promote community-based higher education and economic self-reliance at the grassroots level – a recognition that not all higher education needed to funnel students into urban, formal employment pathways.

The Ramamurti Committee: A critical review in 1990 🔗

By 1990, just four years after the NPE was adopted, concerns were mounting about its implementation gaps and underlying priorities. The implementation of the National Policy on Education 1986 was evaluated by two committees – the Ramamurti Committee (1990) and the Janardhana Reddy Committee (1992). As a result of their recommendations, modifications were made to the NPE in 1992.

On May 7, 1990, the Government of India announced the appointment of a committee to review the NPE 1986, with Acharya Ramamurti as Chairman and sixteen others as members – including vice chancellors, UGC representatives, and senior academicians. The committee submitted its report in December 1990, and it was tabled in Parliament in January 1991.

Key concerns guiding the committee 🔗

The committee’s approach was guided by concerns of equity and social justice, decentralization of educational management, establishment of a participative educational order, inculcation of values indispensable for creating an enlightened and humane society, and empowerment through work. These were not simply additions to the 1986 framework – in several respects, they marked a meaningful reorientation of it.

Linking education to moral values and socio-cultural identity 🔗

One of the most substantive proposals of the Ramamurti Committee was its recommendation on value education. The committee argued that the existing education system had become detached from the cultural and ethical roots of Indian society. The committee emphasized that the importance of moral values should be inculcated in students, and that education should not alienate students from their family, community, and life.

Value education, according to the committee, was to be conceived as a continuous process – not a subject taught in isolation, but woven into the fabric of everyday learning. The committee was critical of an education system that, in its view, still carried colonial assumptions and remained disconnected from the lived realities of Indian students. The preface of the Ramamurti Committee report noted that the education system continued to be governed by the same assumptions as under British rule and remains detached from life and work – a systemic concern the committee sought to address through curricular reform rooted in India’s socio-cultural identity.

Removing disparities and promoting women’s education 🔗

The committee reinforced and sharpened several themes from the original NPE. On removing disparities, the committee noted that rural areas in general, and tribal areas in particular, had suffered in terms of resources, personnel, and infrastructure. It recommended planning and implementing educational development programs through disaggregated, area-specific, community-specific, and gender-specific activities.

On women’s education, the committee pushed for an integrated approach – one that addressed all the factors inhibiting women’s participation, rather than treating female enrollment as a standalone metric. It also recommended that planning, implementation, and monitoring of women’s education programs be handed over to community-level bodies under the Panchayati Raj framework, ensuring local ownership and accountability.

The common school system 🔗

Perhaps the committee’s most structurally ambitious recommendation was its push for a common school system. The committee argued that a common school system was a vital component for securing equity and social justice in education, and called for transforming existing government schools and locally aided schools into high-quality neighbourhood schools accessible to all children regardless of background. This directly challenged the growing divide between government schools and private institutions – a divide the committee saw as antithetical to the NPE’s stated goals of equity.

From Ramamurti to the Programme of Action 1992 🔗

The recommendations of the Ramamurti Committee were considered by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), which then set up a second committee under the chairmanship of N. Janardhana Reddy in July 1991. The Janardhana Reddy Committee’s report concluded that very few major changes were required in the NPE 1986, and most of its recommendations confirmed the direction set by Ramamurti rather than departing from it.

The result was the Programme of Action (PoA) 1992 – a revised policy framework adopted on May 7, 1992, under the P. V. Narasimha Rao government. It introduced modifications such as including Class 12 within the school system, placing greater emphasis on literacy campaigns, and allocating more than 6% of national income to education. The core principles of the NPE 1986, however, remained intact – the PoA 1992 represented refinement, not replacement.

The legacy of the Second NPE and the Ramamurti review together is significant. They collectively moved Indian education policy from a purely structural and access-focused framework to one that also asked deeper questions – about what values education should transmit, whose cultural identity it should reflect, and how genuinely it serves those most left behind. Many of these questions remain just as relevant in the era of the National Education Policy 2020, which explicitly builds on the equity and inclusion principles first articulated in 1986.

What do you think? The Ramamurti Committee argued that Indian education had become detached from the country’s socio-cultural identity and moral foundations – does that critique still hold today? And with all the reforms since 1986, how much has India actually narrowed the educational gap for its most marginalized communities?

References

1. https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/upload_document/npe.pdf
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Policy_on_Education
3. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/budget_archive/es2005-06/chapt2006/chap106.pdf
4. https://deled.institute/contemporary-indian-society-education/india-education-policy-1986/
5. https://onlinenotebank.wordpress.com/2022/01/15/national-education-policy-review-committee/
6. https://prepp.in/question/when-did-the-operation-blackboard-program-begin-661659b76c11d964bb90248e
7. https://www.adda247.com/teaching-jobs-exam/operation-blackboard/
8. http://karthickenglish2020.blogspot.com/2016/11/ramamurti-review-committee-1990.html
9. https://educerecentre.com/national-policy-of-education-1986/
10. https://www.scribd.com/document/290267263/ramamurti-committee-report-pdf
11. https://www.education.gov.in/en/nep-new