Tag Archives: Development

India has expanded education as a formal right while simultaneously allowing the conditions under which that right is exercised to become increasingly differentiated by market capacity. Because market capacity is structured by caste and class, the marketisation of education can undermine the equalising function that constitutional education rights were intended to serve.

Article 21A, inserted through the Constitution (Eighty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, establishes free and compulsory education as a fundamental right for all children between six and fourteen years of age. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, provides the statutory framework for implementing this constitutional guarantee. This places an obligation on the government to ensure that free and compulsory education reaches children across the most disadvantaged sections of society.

However, there is an evident gap between what the Constitution proclaims education must be, namely, not a private commodity, and what is happening under a neoliberal economic structure. While the right to education is formally universal, as it should be, the quality and conditions under which that right is delivered remain deeply unequal, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable sections of society, particularly students from SC/ST communities.

In India, there are broadly two types of institutional spaces that provide education and shape the kind of education, exposure, infrastructure, and social networks available to a child: private schools and public schools. Private schools operate through fees and market demand, with annual fees ranging from thousands to several lakhs of rupees, and reaching as high as ₹28–30 lakh in some elite schools. Their appeal is often associated not only with classroom teaching but also with advanced infrastructure, English-language education, extracurricular opportunities, technology, and claims of global exposure. Government schools, by contrast, depend substantially on public expenditure and government provision. A 2025 national survey indicates that average annual household expenditure per child in non-government schools was ₹25,002, compared with ₹2,863 in government schools, making household expenditure on non-government schooling nearly nine times higher.

The government budget for School Education and Literacy, as per the latest available Union Budget 2026–27, is ₹83,562 crore, of which around 70–80% goes towards salaries and administrative costs, leaving substantially less budget for infrastructure, school advancements, and labs. This substantially impacts the passing rate of students and the quality of education they receive.

When a private-educated student and a public-educated student enter a university, the field becomes unequal and highly disadvantageous for public-school students. It is within this unequal field that the neoliberal commodification of education becomes particularly important, as access to better educational opportunities increasingly depends on one’s ability to pay.

Neoliberalism places considerable emphasis on markets, competition, individual choice, and the withdrawal or restructuring of direct state provision. When applied to education, these principles can transform education from a predominantly public responsibility into a service increasingly mediated by market mechanisms. It drives the privatisation of government schools, turning education into a marketable commodity driven by competition, choice, and profit. This is what can be seen in the Indian education system.

Rather than increasing funding and upgrading public schools, the right-wing government has used policies to systematically transfer school ownership, management, or funding to private entities. This has resulted in the closure or merger of 94,000 government schools since 2014, as per a NITI Aayog report. That is 25 public schools per day. On the other hand, private unaided schools grew from 2.88 lakh to roughly 3.39 lakh.

This systematic institutional mobility of schools has resulted in two major shifts. First, the migration of public-school students towards private schools, numbering around 86 lakh. Second, those unable to transfer to or pay for private schools were denied their fundamental right to education.

Such consequences of this marketisation cannot be separated from India’s existing social structure. The ability to choose between schools is itself socially differentiated in India, as income, wealth, social capital, geography, and caste are already unequally distributed.

According to the UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education) school database system, around 68.7% of ST students and 62.4% of SC students rely on government schools. For them, public schools continue to function as a major educational lifeline.

A wealthy household facing declining public provision can respond by purchasing private education. A poor household may not have that option. The same policy therefore produces different consequences for different social groups. And therefore, when public education is weakened and monetised, the consequences are not distributed evenly across society, with SC and ST communities bearing a disproportionate share of the impediment.

Furthermore, the incumbent government has allocated just 4% of its GDP to education instead of the 6% recommended by NEP 2020. This gap in allocation, combined with the residual income gap among people, inadequate facilities, and caste domination in government schooling, provides a stark contrast between the constitutional right to formal educational inclusion and substantive equality in education.

In this class and caste divide, SC and ST students are among the most vulnerable. The inequality that begins with access to education continues into the opportunities available to students, eventually contributing to economic inequality. This creates a vicious circular system of unequal education.

unequal schooling → unequal educational attainment → unequal skills and credentials → unequal employment opportunities → reproduction of economic inequality.

Public schooling in India is not simply about education; it is also a political question. In India, neoliberal governance and right-wing politics are lovers, bound together in the making and remaking of the state’s approach to public education. Here, neoliberal restructuring can generate social and economic crises that produce grievances and uncertainty, which right-wing populism can then mobilise politically. In turn, right-wing populism can reinforce the same neoliberal restructuring by redirecting these grievances, generating doubt and distrust towards alternative political and economic narratives, and weakening challenges to the prevailing order.

The recent “School Thik Karo” movement by CJP provides a contemporary illustration of such a love story. The campaign involved visits to government schools, interaction with students, and demands for improvements in educational infrastructure and facilities. What government should fear a demand for better schools? However, rather than being understood simply as a demand for better schools, the campaign encountered political resistance, including restrictions on access to schools in Rajasthan and an FIR in Maharashtra.

This points to a broader tension: government schools are public institutions intended to deliver a constitutional right, yet demands for better infrastructure and greater accountability can become politically contentious. And once again, the consequences fall most heavily on those who have the fewest alternatives: SC and ST students.

Their inability to purchase education, or their household’s lack of the resources necessary to exercise that choice, is a systemic failure of neoliberalism. As neoliberal marketisation increasingly determines who can access quality education, the danger is that education itself, which is intended to enable social mobility, may instead reproduce the inequalities it was expected to overcome.

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar said, “Education is the milk of a tigress, and he who drinks it will not fail to roar.”

But what happens when that milk is filtered by income, caste, and market access? The milk is no longer the same for everyone. Some receive it diluted and adulterated, while others receive what allows them to roar. Who gets which kind of milk, and who decides?

Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte is a development economics researcher, anti-caste writer and public speaker working on inequality, Dalit and Buddhist economics.

The protests against the Ken-Betwa Link Project in Madhya Pradesh emerged from long-standing concerns about the displacement of affected communities and the manner in which one of India’s largest river-linking schemes was being implemented. The Union and Madhya Pradesh governments have presented the Ken-Betwa Link Project as a nationally significant initiative to address chronic water scarcity in the drought-prone Bundelkhand region, arguing that it would strengthen irrigation while improving drinking water availability and power generation. Adivasis in the region have challenged this developmentalist narrative that is often built by ignoring the costs of implementation, which tramples their constitutional rights and livelihoods. The latest phase of the movement began on 3 July 2026 along the Barana River near Kupi village in Chhatarpur district and became one of the most visible mobilisations against the project. Protesters combined forms of civil disobedience with demands that rehabilitation be carried out according to the spirit of the law.

Led largely by Adivasi women and project-affected families, the agitation centred on the Ken-Betwa Link Project as well as the Majhgaon and Runjh irrigation projects. Protesters organised a series of symbolic demonstrations including jal satyagraha (standing in water as a form of protest), chita andolan (lying on funeral pyres) and a symbolic faansi satyagraha, presenting them as expressions of communities being pushed towards “social death” through displacement. Movement leader Amit Bhatnagar also undertook an indefinite hunger strike that lasted nearly two weeks until the protests were forcefully cleared. Protest leaders have maintained that authorities should implement the projects in accordance with existing laws governing land acquisition and environmental protection while respecting the constitutional rights of affected communities which prioritize rehabilitation. The administration has also failed to honour assurances reportedly made during discussions held in April 2026 before the protests came to this intense point. Bhatnagar has pointed to a ₹400-crore corruption scandal linked to the project, which shows massive irregularities in land acquisition and rehabilitation.

Displacement in this case has extended far beyond the loss of land. The affected families stand to lose access to forests, access to water resources, livelihood opportunities and more. Some residents have faced false criminal cases, illegal evictions, electricity disconnections and the demolition of schools as intimidation tactics and extra-legal punishment for participating in the protests. In this context, the protests called for transparent identification of all project-affected families and insisted that rehabilitation precede any displacement. The protests were also occurring within broader demands for an end to coercive administrative practices, especially when it comes to extractive displacement under the banner of development, conveniently marketed as pro-people and welfarist. Given the history of these practices, the movement is not simply a dispute over compensation but one in the long line of political struggles for democratic accountability and constitutional protections for Adivasi and rural communities.

Before dawn on 19 July 2026, a large police contingent cleared the protest site, citing public safety concerns because demonstrators were gathered beneath an under-construction bridge and along the river. While  the administration has rejected allegations of wrongdoing and maintained that all legal procedures were being followed, multiple videos show the heavy-handed use of violence in ending the protests. Authorities stated that protesters were transported back to their villages rather than arrested. Bhatnagar was taken to hospital after his health deteriorated during the prolonged fast. However, this is a clear sign of forcible suppression of the movement, with protestors alleging mass detentions and the use of force to prevent Bhatnagar from addressing the media.

The agitation reflects wider debates surrounding the Ken-Betwa Link Project. As India’s first river-linking project under the National Perspective Plan, it occupies a central place in the government’s broader river interlinking agenda, with an estimated cost of ₹44,605 crore. Environmental groups, hydrologists and rural and Adivasi communities who have been affected have questioned the project’s ecological viability. They dispute the assumption that the Ken basin has surplus water and warn of its impact on forests and the Panna Tiger Reserve. Extensive deforestation and inadequate rehabilitation weaken the project’s developmental claims, while many have already pointed to decentralised water conservation which offers less destructive alternatives that states are reluctant to explore.

The legal framework governing such projects already recognises that displacement extends beyond the acquisition of privately owned land. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (LARR Act) defines project-affected families and provides for rehabilitation and resettlement alongside compensation. Apart from the generic failure of implementation in the Ken-Batwa case, the statutory application has repeatedly been criticised for excluding people whose livelihoods depend on forests, rivers and other common resources or who lack formal land titles, leaving many of those most affected outside its protections. This accountability gap is underscored by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs’ press release, “Rehabilitation of Displaced Tribals” (31 July 2025), which stated that the Union government does not centrally maintain data on displaced or project-affected families, even as it continues to promote large infrastructure projects across the country.

But it is clear that the questions raised here cannot be answered simply by demanding due process in compensatory practices. For decades, scholars of displacement, including Walter Fernandes, have argued that the framework governing displacement requires a more expansive rethinking. Yet policy institutions have largely failed to address these concerns, while successive governments have continued to pursue different forms of displacement through both public and private infrastructure initiatives. Fernandes argues that compensation cannot be confined to the market value of acquired land because displacement disrupts livelihoods rather than simply transferring property. He contends that rehabilitation should recognise all project-affected persons, including those dependent on common resources without formal legal ownership, and enable them to rebuild their lives instead of treating compensation as a one-time financial payment.

Although legislation such as the LARR Act is frequently criticised by corporate interests as placing excessive constraints on land acquisition, the Ken-Betwa experience suggests a different problem. Since the introduction of the Act, human right activists have pointed to the limited procedural and substantive protections that the Act provides. But even the minimal formal recognition and rights seem to be rendered ineffective when the state itself becomes the principal agent of acquisition. As Sanjoy Chakravorty argues in his formulation of the “taking state”, the concentration of acquisition powers within the state enables it to overcome legal safeguards through administrative practice. The struggle over Ken-Betwa is therefore also a struggle over whether constitutional and statutory protections can meaningfully constrain state-led development when the communities bearing its costs are Adivasi and rural populations.

The July protests also represent more than a local struggle over rehabilitation. They also highlight a wider contest over how large infrastructure projects should proceed when they affect the rights of tribal communities and fragile ecosystems. Not only is the Indian state continuously engaged in authoritarian extractivism, but has effectively framed its biddings under the PR of welfare while continuously trampling the civil liberties and the right to dissent of people affected. The events unfolding at Ken-Betwa over the last few days reaffirm that struggles against displacement cannot be left to affected communities alone, but require broader democratic solidarity across movements.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.