By Mohammad Asif Iqbal
NEW DELHI: India’s education system is undergoing one of the most significant transformations in its history. With the vision of becoming a developed nation by 2047, the country is shifting its focus beyond merely increasing school enrollment to enhancing the overall quality of student learning, accessibility, inclusion, and future readiness.
However, the question remains: is the country moving forward—even if at a slow pace rather than a rapid one—towards the vision we have set for ourselves? Let us try to understand this based on two reports by NITI Aayog. These reports not only shed light on the current situation to some extent but also allow us to grasp the prevailing socio-political scenario, along with the existing challenges and opportunities.
According to a recent report published by NITI Aayog, Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat @2047 identifies 8.7 crore people aged 15 to 29 who are not engaged in education, employment or training (also called the NEET population), including those who are unemployed. The report, based on data from the 78th round of the National Sample Survey conducted in 2021, identifies this group as NEET youth, those not in education, employment or training, including unemployed people.
NITI Aayog said that NEET youth, along with women, need affordable or subsidized training and financial support, while skilling programmes should be linked to local demand, self-employment opportunities and emerging sectors.
The report also highlighted a weak link between formal education and employment. Only 8.25% of graduates are employed in roles aligned with their qualifications, it said, pointing to gaps in practical exposure and industry-oriented training.
Another number that makes this story much more complicated, around 88% of this group is engaged in domestic duties while the report does not provide a male-female breakup of these 8.7 crore young people, its separate analysis of women shows why domestic responsibilities, mobility and access to work cannot be treated as side issues in India’s skilling debate.
On the other hand, you know that Generation Z refers to Youngers who are born between 1997 and 2012. In the current population, this generation is currently based on the youngsters between the ages of 13 and 29. This means that the current report is based on Generation Z, which is why they are more aggressively engaged in protests today and are trying to reclaim their rights.
Meanwhile, commenting on the aforementioned NITI Aayog report, Opposition Leader Kharge said the government has “destroyed” the education-to-employment pathway. Referring to the 8.7 crore young Indians identified as NEET, not in education, employment or training, he questioned the government on job creation and the state of youth employment.
Kharge asked where are the jobs for graduates and what happened to the BJP’s earlier promise of creating two crore jobs every year? He also criticised the delay in recruitment, vacant government posts, exam paper leaks and lack of secure employment.
In May 2026, NITI Aayog had released another major policy document titled ‘School Education System in India: A Timeline Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement’. Vice Chairman Suman Berry and CEO Nidhi Chhebar formally launched the report, which provides a decade-long review of India’s vast school education sector and maps out a future path aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The report candidly identifies 11 major challenges spanning systemic and academic domains. While specific details are not exhaustively listed in the release, common persistent issues in Indian education — teacher vacancies and uneven deployment, uneven learning outcomes across states and socio-economic groups, high dropout rates at secondary levels (especially among disadvantaged groups), quality of vocational education, and effective integration of technology — are likely central.
Despite infrastructural progress, the gap between access/enrolment and genuine learning outcomes remains a core concern. ASER reports have historically shown that enrolment gains have not always translated into proportional competency gains. The report notes “signs of recovery” rather than transformative improvement, indicating that foundational weaknesses exposed during the pandemic have not been fully overcome.
Try to understand another statistic between these two reports, these statistics show that over the last five years, more than 6.5 million (65 lakh) children in India have dropped out of school, Minister of State for Women and Child Development Savitri Thakur had revealed in Parliament. Among them, nearly 3 million (30 lakh) are adolescent girls. The numbers point to a large-scale rupture in India’s promise of universal education, and also to structural gaps in the way schooling is planned, supported and delivered, especially for children from marginalised families.
The data shows that 65.7 million children left school between 2019 and 2024. Of these, 2.98 million were girls in the adolescent age group, as reported by India Today.
A state-wise breakdown revealed that Gujarat recorded the highest number of out-of-school children in the 2025–26 academic year. The state identified 240,000 (2.4 lakh) such children, including 110,000 (1.1 lakh) girls. In comparison, Gujarat had reported only 54,541 out-of-school children in 2024. This marks a jump of over 340 percent in a single year. Other states with high dropout numbers included Assam, which reported 150,906 (1.5 lakh) out-of-school children, of whom 57,409 were girls. Uttar Pradesh recorded 99,218 dropouts, including 56,462 girls.
In the light of reports, statistics and facts, it is clear that NITI Aayog is presenting solutions to problems to some extent as per its responsibility and is also publishing fact-based reports. On the other hand, opposition leaders and Gen Z and Gen Alpha are actively working to regain their rights as mentioned in the constitution as well as in the policies.
Now the question arises that why is the current government failing to solve the problems and formulate a course of action in the light of facts and implement it? Does it not want to implement the course of action proposed by NITI Aayog, which it has made, or does it have some other constraints, which it does not even clearly state and does not seem to be successful in solving the problems.
The fact is that in the current situation, the commercialization of education has become a very big and serious problem. Therefore, it is important to see who is involved in the commercialization of education and what is the nature of their relationship with the state governments as well as with the Centre. And today, when privatization has become common, what major changes are needed in terms of policy in this matter? Policy-making institutions, organizations and political parties should also pay attention to this.
We believe that if this happens, it is very possible that not immediately but after some time, students and youth associated with the education system and education policy, teachers and the country itself and the people of the country will move forward. Towards development and success, towards prosperity and employment, towards intellectual harmony and peace and order!
About the writer: Mohammad Asif Iqbal is an Indian columnist and freelance journalist from New Delhi. He has extensively written on rural India, his notable interests are poverty, structural inequities, caste discrimination, and socio-economic as well as educational issue of the Indian society. He has written more than 300 columns on the issues.
Courtesy: India Tomorrow
