In his presentation to students at Kota in June, Rahul Gandhi identified three structural forces causing the deterioration of our education system – privatisation, centralisation, and sanghi-fication. I must agree with his grim assessment of India’s education landscape. I retired as the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on education on June 21 this year. In my two-year tenure, the committee unanimously adopted 22 different reports. The following are my personal observations on the privatisation of our education system, many of which have been reflected in our committee’s reports. I will write on the centralisation and sanghi-fication of our education system separately.We must first acknowledge that a robust public education system is the lifeblood of democracy, without which we cannot achieve the social, political and economic justice envisioned by our constitution. The critical importance of education is best captured in Babasaheb’s slogan of ‘Education, Agitate, Organise’ which rightfully identifies education as the chronological first step to any social change. The state therefore has distinct responsibilities for the provision of high-quality, accessible public education. Our education system has taken an ugly turn towards privatisation over the last decade. The budget allocations to education are emblematic of this trend. The Modi government has halved the school education department’s proportion of the budget – from 3.07% of the total outlay in FY2014-15 to 1.56% in FY2026-27. For higher education, the allocation has fallen from 1.54% to 1.04% of the budget. This under-investment in public education has naturally opened the floodgates for profit-minded private players.At the school level, the most alarming development has been the reported closure of about 1 lakh state government schools. There is, however, no definitive data source for the same – because as the Union education ministry informed the committee, it does not track school closures. This is a shocking abdication of responsibility; it doubles up as a tragedy when you imagine whether any authority is tracking the students displaced by these school closures. The argument that school education is largely under state control and the Modi government is exempt from accountability for school closures holds little moral weight. The Right to Education Act 2009, which calls for schools in close geographic proximity to students, effects a fundamental right enshrined in the Indian constitution. The Union government cannot wash its hands off the mockery that is being made of this right by school closures. In fact, the NITI Aayog conceptualised and championed school closures in states like Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. It is the Modi government’s policies that have gutted our state government schools.The consolidation of schools has not resulted in greater resource allocations for extant state government schools. The parliamentary committee noted in its report last year that there were about 10 lakh vacant teacher positions in India’s government school system. These vacancies are the single-most important reason for the abundance of multi-grade classrooms where teachers cannot provide effective instruction. The Union education ministry’s stagnant budget also precludes it from enhancing financial support for State Governments to invest in school infrastructure development.Faced with the double onslaught of government-school closures as well as their collapsing infrastructure and teaching, students have embarked on a mass exodus to private schools. Even as government schools were shut down, nearly 43,000 additional private schools have opened in the country. These private schools charge outrageously high fees, even while lacking the additional support of mid-day meals, free textbooks, free uniforms, etc that government schools provide. The quality of private schools’ teachers and the instruction provided is also mixed. The government’s Comprehensive Modular Survey Education 2025 showed that the family’s expenditure for private schools is 10 times greater than for government schools. India’s students are paying far more out of pocket while receiving few additional educational benefits.Special mention must be made of the policy decisions that have resulted in the de-facto privatization of secondary education. The RTE sparked tremendous investment in schools, teachers, and support structures for students until Grade 8. The recent reversals under the Modi government notwithstanding, it was largely successful in achieving near-universal primary education. The time was appropriate, therefore, for an extension of the RTE until Grade 12. The Modi government’s own NEP calls for universal secondary education by 2030, and the parliamentary committee has recommended that we extend the RTE to Grade 12. The government has not heeded the advice and has consequently failed to invest in secondary education. The education ministry does not even have an estimate of secondary school dropouts. Farcically, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) meant for understanding India’s workforce has become the best way to identify these out-of-school children. It estimates that at least 2 crore children between 14-18 years of age are out of school.The situation is equally grim in higher education. The most dangerous trend has been the Modi government’s introduction of the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) in 2017. Central higher education institutions were asked to seek HEFA loans rather than rely on government grants for capital expansion. To service these loans, universities resorted to increasing student fees. An assessment conducted by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy revealed that 78% of these HEFA loan repayments are financed through student fees. Damningly, it also revealed that the Higher Education Department itself asked institutions to increase their fees to repay HEFA loans. The financial privatisation of our government-run higher educational institutions is not happenstance. It is an official government policy. Equally concerning is the proliferation of low-quality private universities. Sikkim, with a population of 600,000, is home to a whopping 28 private universities. Arunachal Pradesh is similarly home to eight private universities. Both states have only one central university each and one new state university each. It is hard to believe that quality teaching is being imparted in these states’ numerous private universities, most of which are barely functional. It is unclear what the University Grants Commission – tasked with determining and maintaining standards of university education – is doing to stem the tide of low-quality private institutions. Private participation in education is both welcome and necessary. But the state cannot aid and abet privatisation by gutting its education budget or abdicating its governance responsibilities of data-collection and standard-setting. Doing so threatens the accessibility of our education and opportunities for social advancement for crores of India’s people. What is at stake therefore is our economic growth, our social cohesion, and – as has become evident this week – our very democracy itself. Digvijaya Singh is the former chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education.