Five Years of NEP: Can Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill Fix India’s Education Gap?

To answer this, it is important to examine the Bill’s provisions and consider what additional value it brings to the NEP. While the NEP offers a visionary framework, it is often argued that its potential is limited without robust statutory and accountability-driven legislation. The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill aims to address this by providing comprehensive oversight and accountability in education. It seeks to institutionalise reforms, ensure measurable outcomes, and align education with national development goals.

Building a robust, inclusive, and future-ready education system is absolutely imperative for the development of any country. India, with its enormous potential, stands at a crossroads: it can reap a demographic dividend or risk facing significant challenges.

The outcome largely depends on how the country manages its 65% population under the age of 35. Quality education, skill development, and values-based learning are crucial; without these, the demographic advantage could easily turn into a liability — resulting in unemployment, inequality, and social unrest.

While elementary-level enrolment is nearly universal, India continues to face significant challenges: poor learning outcomes, lack of foundational literacy and numeracy, disparities across states, outdated curricula, teacher shortages, weak governance, and limited accountability. The question remains: will legal enforceability address these persistent issues?

Multiple Stakeholders 

Multiple ministries and institutions are responsible for education in India, and the challenges are compounded by the country’s federal structure. There is often a lack of coordination among agencies operating at different levels. This fragmentation makes monitoring difficult, as no single agency oversees learning outcomes holistically, despite the existence of bodies like the NCERT, UGC, AICTE, and state education departments.

Further, there is no overarching institution to enforce accountability for public expenditure or to ensure alignment with national development priorities. Evidence-based periodic reviews are also lacking.

How The Bill Will Help 

The Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, was a historic milestone, but it focused primarily on access and infrastructure rather than learning outcomes, employability, innovation, or global competitiveness. The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill seeks to fill this critical gap.

Ironically, despite substantial expenditure in the education sector, learning outcomes have not improved significantly. The Bill proposes to shift the focus toward measurable outcomes, such as foundational skills, critical thinking, digital literacy, and employability. It would mandate outcome-based benchmarks at every stage of education. This objective aligns with the NEP, but the proposed legislation aims to give legal force to these policy intentions.

The Bill proposes the establishment of a National Shiksha Adhishthan Authority, along with corresponding state bodies, endowed with statutory powers to monitor, audit, evaluate, and publicly report on the performance of educational institutions and authorities. This is expected to reduce arbitrariness, curb corruption, and improve governance. Provisions in the Bill also legally mandate governments to bridge learning gaps and protect the interests of marginalised groups.

Teachers are pivotal to education reform. The Bill addresses issues related to their recruitment, training, evaluation, and the provision of dignified service conditions.

In recent years, there has been a rapid proliferation of private schools, coaching centres, ed-tech platforms, and online universities. The absence of a unified oversight mechanism has led to exploitation, high costs, and quality concerns. The Shiksha Adhishthan Bill proposes to ensure student-centric regulation, fee transparency, quality assurance, and ethical practices across all modes of education.

The NEP recommends periodic curriculum reviews to ensure alignment with evolving national and global needs, while preserving India’s cultural and civilizational ethos. The proposed Bill provides legal backing for these recommendations.

In deference to India’s federal structure, the Bill clearly defines the roles of the Centre, states, and local bodies. It also proposes mechanisms for coordination, data sharing, and the dissemination of best practices. While states would retain flexibility, they would operate within a nationally agreed accountability framework.

To ensure accountability, the Bill mandates the submission of annual reports on the “State of Education in India” and the creation of public dashboards displaying school and university performance. It also establishes grievance redressal mechanisms for students and parents, along with provisions for social audits and community participation.

The legislation assumes it will address the vulnerability to political discontinuity. However, whether a statutory oversight law can ensure policy continuity beyond electoral cycles — insulating long-term reforms from short-term populism — remains an open question.

Challenge Of Implementation

The key question is whether legislation is necessary to realise the intentions outlined in the NEP. Does implementing the NEP’s provisions require a new law, and would such legislation effectively solve the country’s educational challenges?

Experience with the Right to Education Act (RTE) suggests otherwise; in fact, during my tenure as Secretary, School Education, Government of India, I found that the RTE sometimes created more problems than it solved.

Moreover, why should the government legislate when it is already responsible for acting on its own policies? The only clear advantage of legislation is enforceability through courts, but India’s courts are already overburdened and struggling to handle existing cases.

Instead of new legislation, there should be a detailed action plan based on NEP recommendations, clearly outlining what needs to be done, how, by whom, and within what timeframe. The fundamental problem in India is not the lack of laws or policies, but the challenge of implementation.

(The writer is a retired IAS officer. Views are personal.)