Quality and Inequality in Indian Education

Abstract

The paper locates educational policy in a wider sociohistorical and political perspective and aims at an ideological deconstruction of policy change with a specific focus on the equality-quality conundrum in elementary education in India. It attempts to critically decode changes in notions and practices of equality and quality in national and international policy prescription, highlighting aspects of ideological contexts, power asymmetries and state dynamics and examines basic shifts in policy discourse and intent. The paper is organised in four parts. The first two parts take a broad historical overview to examine notions of equality and quality, articulated in texts and discussions pertaining to the two national educational policies and in policy initiatives introduced by the Indian state under neoliberal, global hegemonic influence. The interactive impact of educational restructuring and structures of stratification as reflected in the aggravation of key caste, class, gender and ethnic inequalities is captured in the third part of the paper. The final part of the paper draws attention to dilutions and contradictions inherent in recent policy shifts to argue that any meaningful notion of quality education for the poor is impossible to attain in the present context. It unravels the politics of quality.n alarming state of affairs currently grips the Indian education system. It affects the present and future of Ami llions of Indian children. The continuing failure to enrol and ensure the basic learning of, leave alone meaningfully educate, vast multitudes of children especially those belonging to subordinated groups and to linguistic and cultural minorities bespeaks the failure to breach the link between

Ironies of democracy: Purposes of education and the construction of citizens in Sweden, India and the United States

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“…While most children within these schools belonged to migrant and working-class families, confronting the precariousness of urban living (Velaskar, 2010), and lacked access to basic amenities such as clean drinking water, programmes unmindfully placed expectations on them, such as that of coming to school cleanly dressed. Visits to children’s homes revealed the difficult conditions of living faced by them, such as having to cope with cramped single-room households, which often spilled into the streets.…”

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