Understanding the Role of the Government in India’s Education System

Education in India didn’t begin in a government office or a parliamentary debate. It began under trees, in temples, and in the homes of scholars – long before any formal state machinery existed. But as India moved from ancient kingdoms through colonial rule to a sovereign republic, the question of who governs education became one of the most consequential policy decisions in the country’s history. Today, that responsibility sits firmly with the Government of India – but the journey to get here spans centuries of patronage, struggle, and reform.

Ancient roots: when kings and traders funded learning 🔗

In pre-British India, education was never a state monopoly in the modern sense. Ancient centers of learning like Takshashila and Nalanda were supported by royal patronage, merchant guilds, and religious institutions. Kings funded schools attached to temples; traders endowed institutions to ensure literate communities for commerce; Buddhist monasteries ran their own systems of instruction. Education was tied closely to social role and religious identity – Brahmins learned scriptures, Kshatriyas trained in warfare, and artisans passed skills through apprenticeship.

The Gurukul system – where students lived with their teachers and received a holistic education – was the dominant model. Islamic education, introduced during the medieval period, added Maktabs and Madrasas to the landscape, teaching Arabic, Persian, mathematics, history, and Islamic law. Early British administrators’ reports documented that around 30% of children aged 6 to 15 attended indigenous schools in parts of the Bombay, Bengal, and Madras Presidencies – a figure that challenges the assumption that mass education began only with colonialism.

The critical point is this: for most of India’s ancient and medieval history, the government – or the ruling authority – was a patron, not a regulator. Education was decentralized, community-driven, and varied enormously across regions and castes.

The British period: education as an administrative tool 🔗

When the British East India Company arrived in India as traders, they showed little initial interest in Indian education. It was only in 1813, during the renewal of the Company’s Charter, that a small portion of revenues was directed toward educating the people of India – and at that time, only two formal educational institutions existed: the Calcutta Madrasa and the Benares Hindu Sanskrit College.

The real shift came with Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, which pushed for Western-style English-medium education, and Charles Wood’s Despatch of 1854, which recommended establishing government-supported education departments in each province. These colonial policies created a structured hierarchy from primary to university level – but the purpose was largely instrumental: to produce clerks and administrators for the British machinery, not to achieve mass literacy or preserve indigenous knowledge.

As historians have observed, colonial education was exclusionary by design – elitist, urban-centric, and English-medium – reinforcing social hierarchies and marginalizing indigenous knowledge systems. Fees were deliberately kept high to restrict access. By 1901, despite over 150 years of British presence, there were only 5 universities and 145 colleges serving roughly 18,000 students – almost all male.

Pre-independence developments: Gokhale’s landmark resolution 🔗

The push for a genuinely public, government-funded education system came not from the British administration, but from Indian leaders. The most significant pre-independence intervention came from Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a veteran nationalist and member of the Imperial Legislative Council.

By the time Gokhale raised his voice, only about 6% of Indians were literate – a damning statistic after a century and a half of British rule. On March 18, 1910, Gokhale moved a resolution before the Imperial Legislative Council calling for free and compulsory elementary education across the country. His proposal was specific: primary education should be made compulsory in areas where at least 35% of boys were already receiving schooling, targeting children in the 6-10 age group. The costs were to be shared between provincial governments and local bodies in a 2:1 ratio.

The British government’s response was tepid. While the government assured Gokhale the matter would receive attention and he withdrew his resolution, they accepted only the peripheral recommendations – establishing a separate Department of Education under the Central Government and beginning to publish annual reviews of educational progress. The core demand for free and compulsory primary education was ignored.

Undeterred, Gokhale introduced a private member’s bill in 1911 to phase in compulsory primary education, broadly modeled on England’s own Education Acts of 1870 and 1876. This bill was defeated after debate in March 1912, but it achieved something the government could not suppress: it put universal elementary education firmly on the national agenda. Between 1910 and 1917, there was unprecedented growth of primary education on a voluntary basis – a direct result of the public consciousness Gokhale had stirred.

The Government of India did pass a resolution on educational policy on February 21, 1913, which included provisions for expanding lower primary schools – but the principle of compulsion remained unaddressed. It was only in 1917 that Vithalbhai Patel succeeded in passing the first actual law on compulsory education, known as the Patel Act – carrying Gokhale’s dream one step closer to reality.

The Sargent Plan and the road to independence 🔗

As India moved closer to independence, the British administration made one final attempt at comprehensive educational planning. The Sargent Commission, set up in 1944 under Sir John Sargent, submitted a detailed report – known as the Sargent Scheme – that proposed free and compulsory education for children aged 6-14, along with expansion of secondary and vocational education. While it laid important groundwork, implementation was limited by wartime constraints and the imminent transfer of power. Nonetheless, it provided a policy blueprint that would influence independent India’s approach to education governance.

Post-independence evolution: building a national ministry 🔗

When India gained independence on August 15, 1947, the new government faced an enormous challenge: building an educational system for a newly free, deeply diverse, and largely illiterate nation. The Ministry of Education was formally established in 1947, with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad serving as India’s first Education Minister – a role he held from 1947 to 1958, the longest tenure of any education minister in the country’s history.

The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, made education a responsibility of both the state and central governments. The Constitution makers recognized that a stable democracy requires an educated electorate, and embedded the principle of equality of educational opportunity within the constitutional framework. Article 45 in the Directive Principles of State Policy mandated that the state endeavor to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of fourteen within ten years of the Constitution coming into force.

In the decades that followed, a series of education commissions shaped national policy. The University Education Commission of 1948 was the first such body in independent India, followed by the Secondary Education Commission in 1952, and the landmark Kothari Commission of 1964-66 – which led to India’s first National Policy on Education in 1968. A second National Policy on Education was adopted in 1986, and a revised version followed in 1992.

The MHRD era and the return to “Ministry of Education” 🔗

A significant structural change occurred in 1985 when the Rajiv Gandhi government renamed the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) – a rebranding that reflected a broader vision of education as part of national human resource development rather than a standalone policy domain. The renaming also coincided with the new National Policy on Education 1986, which introduced the uniform 10+2+3 structure across the country.

The ministry remained the MHRD for over three decades. Then, with the adoption of the National Education Policy 2020 – the most comprehensive overhaul of India’s education system since 1986 – the ministry was renamed back to the Ministry of Education (MoE), signaling a renewed focus on education as a distinct, rights-based domain of public policy.

Current structure: how education governance works today 🔗

The Ministry of Education today functions through two primary departments, each with a distinct mandate covering different stages of education.

Department of School Education and Literacy 🔗

This department is responsible for the development of school education across all levels – primary, secondary, and higher secondary – as well as adult education and literacy programs. Its mandate includes universalizing access to elementary education, improving the quality of schooling, implementing the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act), and addressing the needs of disadvantaged groups including girls, children with disabilities, and students from marginalized communities.

Programs like Samagra Shiksha – which merges the earlier Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, and Teacher Education initiatives – fall under this department. The department also oversees the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which develops curriculum frameworks and textbooks used across the country.

Department of Higher Education 🔗

The Department of Higher Education oversees one of the largest higher education systems in the world – third only to the United States and China. It is responsible for university-level education, technical education, research institutions, and scholarships. The department works with over 100 autonomous bodies divided across eight bureaus.

Key institutions under this department include the University Grants Commission (UGC), which funds and maintains standards in universities; the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which regulates technical education; and premier institutions like the IITs, IIMs, central universities, and IISERs. The department is also empowered to grant deemed university status to eligible institutions on the advice of the UGC under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956.

Under the NEP 2020, significant reforms are underway in higher education – including the proposed National Higher Education Regulatory Council (NHERC) to serve as a single overarching regulator, and PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) to standardize student learning assessments.

Education as a concurrent subject: the state-centre balance 🔗

One feature of India’s education governance that often goes unnoticed is how responsibility is distributed between the central and state governments. Education has remained the primary responsibility of state governments, with the central government coordinating standards, funding national institutions, and implementing flagship programs. This division was formalized when education was moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment in 1976 – giving the central government a stronger legislative role while states retained operational control.

This federal structure means that while the Ministry of Education sets national policy and provides funding through schemes, states adapt and implement education programs based on regional needs. The result is a system that is nationally coordinated but locally administered – with all the complexity and inconsistency that implies.

From royal patronage in ancient India, through a colonial system designed to serve imperial interests, to a constitutional commitment to universal education and a modern ministry with two distinct departments – the arc of government involvement in Indian education is a story of gradually expanding responsibility. What began as the concern of kings and traders is now a fundamental obligation of the state, enshrined in law and backed by a vast institutional structure.

What do you think? Given that education is a concurrent subject shared between the Centre and the states, who should have the final say in curriculum decisions – the national government or the state? And with the Ministry of Education having gone through multiple name changes and structural shifts, do these changes reflect genuine policy priorities, or are they primarily symbolic?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_Indian_subcontinent
2. https://bidyapatibedstudy.wordpress.com/2023/11/23/pre-independent-indian-education-policy/
3. https://aishe.gov.in/about-ministry-of-education/
4. https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRHJ06021.pdf
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244017727037
6. https://deled.institute/contemporary-indian-society–education/evolution-right-to-education-act-india/
7. https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/education/movement-for-compulsory-education-in-india/44837
8. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp13/chapter/history-of-education-policy-in-india/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education_(India)
10. https://www.education.gov.in/en
11. https://www.britannica.com/topic/education/The-postindependence-period-in-India