This year India’s youth found an unlikely emblem. When the Chief Justice of India (CJI) likened unemployed youth to cockroaches who, failing to find work, turned to social media, journalism and Right to Information (RTI) petitions to “attack the system,” the insult was picked up and worn with defiance. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began as an online joke and ended up as a nationwide movement. The CJI’s attempt to temper his words came a little too late. The anger had material reasons behind it: entry-level hiring has been thinned by automation, while the demographic dividend seems slow to pay out.Then the movement did something more interesting than protest. It photographed government schools against a four-point checklist: water and toilets; electricity and usable classrooms; boundary walls; and whether the midday meal arrived and the teacher turned up. Images of crumbling classrooms, unusable washrooms and meagre meals are not a census. They do, however, point to what the official record confirms.By NITI Aayog’s own count, India had about 94,000 fewer government schools in 2024-25 than a decade earlier, while private schools had grown by about 51,000. Rajasthan responded by barring “outsiders” and photography in its schools, a rule defensible on grounds of child safety but one that also removes an independent check on the official account.Over the past decade, the institutions that teach Indians to think have been reshaped, one regulation, one appointment and one budget line at a time. Each change comes with an official justification. Several have been upheld in court. Whether they add up to a design is a question of motive, and motive is seldom written down. What can be written down is the architecture. Read together, the elements appear to run in one direction.What is the purpose of education after all?The question of what makes a good education is older than any ministry. In Plato’s Laches, two Athenian fathers ask a pair of distinguished generals how their sons ought to be raised. Within a few pages, the conversation turns to what courage actually is and ends without an answer. That is the point. Education, at its best, is not the transfer of settled conclusions but the practice of engaging with unsettled questions.Tagore at Santiniketan, Azad as the Republic’s first education minister and Radhakrishnan’s university commission argued, in very different idioms, for schooling that produces judgement rather than obedience.A liberal education was never simply about acquiring a narrow set of skills. It is the capacity to weigh information, place it in context and act on one’s own judgement. It is also a capacity whose absence is least visible. Technical skills can be exported and rewarded without it.Indian aspirations already lean in that direction. A family that prizes an engineering seat over a history degree is making a rational bet in a tight job market. Policy can correct that tilt or deepen it. Over the past decade, it has mostly deepened it, less through announcements than through the allocation of money.Following the moneyIn absolute terms the Union government spends more on education than ever: Rs 1,39,289 crore for 2026-27. As a share of the Union budget, though, education’s allocation has fallen from 4.6% in 2013-14 to about 2.5%. Combined public spending stands at 4.1% of gross domestic product (GDP), against the National Education Policy’s (NEP) own target of 6%. The shape of the money has changed as much as its size.Since 2017, the Higher Education Financing Agency has lent institutions money that capital grants once provided, with repayment expected, in part, from their own revenue, including fees. At institutions that borrowed, fees rose: MTech fees at IIT Delhi more than doubled, while JNU hostel rent went from Rs 10-20 a month to Rs 300-600. Fees rise for many reasons, but the incentive is not difficult to read.Also read: Modi Govt Hasn’t Revised Income Eligibility Criterion for Key SC, ST Scholarship in 13 YearsThe squeeze extends further down the line. In 2024-25, the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) allocation fell by 61% even as direct grants to central universities rose. The loss falls on state universities, which teach most of India’s students. The Maulana Azad National Fellowship, which had supported 6,722 minority scholars, was discontinued in 2022 on the grounds that it “overlapped” with other schemes.The fellowship for students belonging to Other Backward Classes was trimmed, while the centrally run Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship was expanded. National research spending stands at 0.84% of GDP, with funding now largely coming from private sources, while industry funds applied research. The humanities and social sciences, where questions of freedom are most often contested, depend almost entirely on the public purse.Who holds the pen?Money shapes how institutions behave, but it does not determine who controls them. That is settled by rules, and those rules are being rewritten to shift control away from universities and the states towards the Union.Consider university leadership first. The draft UGC Regulations of 2025 allow the chancellor, in the case of state universities the governor, to constitute the committee that selects a vice-chancellor, without giving the elected state government a seat on it. They also open the post to non-academics and threaten universities that do not comply with the loss of recognition. Six states have formally objected.Next, consider the regulator. The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, now stalled before a parliamentary committee, would fold three regulators into a single body whose chairperson is appointed by the Union, with appeals going to the Union government and whose decisions would be binding. At the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), this shift has already become law. The autonomy parliament granted in 2017 was withdrawn in 2023.Finally, consider the teachers. In January 2025, 29% of teaching posts in central universities lay vacant. The same draft regulations would lift the cap on contractual hiring. A teacher on a renewable contract needs no explicit instruction to avoid controversy.Appointments complete this architecture. At one of the country’s most celebrated universities, the vice-chancellor had previously been found guilty of misconduct by a judicial inquiry and had been turned down on vigilance grounds by another central university a year before her appointment. A national council for historical research was handed to a chairman with no peer-reviewed record, who had once written that the caste system “worked well”.Two successive chancellors of a revived ancient university walked away, one observing that the government felt “unrestrained” in its interference, the other saying that the autonomy he had been promised “appears not to be the case now”. Patronage is not new to Indian academia, and many recent appointees are serious scholars. What is new is that the checks on appointments have been narrowed at the same time.What a child is permitted to know ?The changes also reach directly into the syllabus. Between 2022 and 2025, NCERT removed from its textbooks the theory of evolution, the periodic table, the chapter on the Mughal court, references to the 2002 Gujarat violence, chapters on popular struggles and challenges to democracy, and the sentences recording that Gandhi’s pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity “provoked Hindu extremists” and that the RSS was briefly banned after his murder.Some of these deletions did not even appear on NCERT’s own published list of changes. The stated reason was the pandemic-induced “content load”. The pandemic may explain the need for trimming, but it cannot explain the selection. More than 1,800 scientists and educators called for evolution to be restored. None of these deletions has been reversed.The additions tell the other half of the story. A new Class 7 textbook dropped the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals while adding chapters on sacred geography, the Maha Kumbh and government schemes such as Make in India. The new Class 8 textbook brought the Mughals back, chiefly through accounts of their violence, under a “note on some darker periods in history”.Candour about medieval brutality is defensible. The question is whether the rulers of one community are being singled out while comparable episodes are quietly removed elsewhere.Language follows a similar logic. The NEP 2020 discusses India’s languages at length and champions the mother tongue, yet Urdu, the first language of millions across the old United Provinces and beyond, does not appear in it by name, an omission the government insisted did not imply exclusion.Pride and critique are not incompatible. The deletions, however, show which has prevailed.The price of speaking upThe experiences of individual scholars complete this harrowing picture. In May 2025, Ali Khan Mahmudabad of Ashoka University was arrested on charges of endangering India’s sovereignty over a Facebook post written during Operation Sindoor. The post praised the women officers briefing the press while criticising lynchings. Haryana dropped the case 10 months later, describing it as “a one-time magnanimity”.Ramadas Prini Sivanandan, a Dalit doctoral scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, was suspended for two years, partly for urging students to watch Ram ke Naam, an “anti-national act” in the institute’s words. The Supreme Court reinstated him a year later.Sabyasachi Das left Ashoka after publishing a paper raising the possibility of manipulation in the 2019 election. Intelligence Bureau officials later came asking for him. Pratap Bhanu Mehta had already resigned from the same university, his association having become “a political liability”.A former JNU doctoral student has been held without trial since September 2020, while JNU now fines students Rs 20,000 for holding dharnas within 100 metres of its academic buildings.Also read: Of Shame, Impunity, Immunity: The Matter of Umar KhalidScholars do not always lose; vindication, however, often comes late. Professor G.N. Saibaba was acquitted after close to a decade in prison and died months afterwards. When the process itself becomes the punishment, the lesson for everyone watching is to keep quiet. Institutions that produce evidence learn that lesson too.A leading think tank lost its foreign-funding licence, while a polling centre had its grant held “in abeyance” after publicly correcting an error about the Election Commission. Self-censorship leaves no paper trail. It reveals itself only through absence: a seminar not convened, a paper not posted, a question not asked.For readers who prefer a number, there is one. The Academic Freedom Index, compiled by the V-Dem Institute, scored India 0.14 out of 1 for 2025, the lowest in a series that began in 1900 and lower than during the Emergency. The index rests on expert assessments, and its methodology is contested. One need not rely on it. The record stands without it.A larger, more careful systemThe government’s answer is growth, and the growth is real.Higher education enrolment rose by 26.5% between 2014-15 and 2021-22, PhD enrolment by 81%, and 54 Indian institutions featured in the QS world rankings, compared with 11 a decade earlier. Some also argue that campuses were long dominated by a single ideological consensus and that recent changes are intended to restore balance. Both points deserve a hearing. Neither, however, answers the central finding.Enrolment measures who walks through the gate, not what they are allowed to say once inside. And the measures recorded here are formal acts of the state, not merely pressures exerted in faculty lounges. A system can grow larger and less free at the same time.No single order, arrest or deleted chapter establishes that India’s academic architecture is being dismantled. The case rests on convergence. Over the past decade, authority has moved towards the Union government; money has shifted from grants to loans and from entitlements to discretion. Teachers have become fewer and less secure. Textbooks have lost evolution, democratic protest and inconvenient history, while scholars who speak out have been prosecuted, suspended or eased out.Whether this was designed, or is the sum of many decisions taken in the same political climate, is something the record cannot finally establish. The effect, either way, is the same. A university that cannot choose its head, fund its buildings, retain its teachers or protect its scholars learns to be careful. And a generation educated in careful institutions learns that the safest question is the one left unasked.Which brings us back to the photographs. A cohort dismissed as a nuisance took its phones into village schools because it suspected the official account was incomplete. That instinct, to doubt, to check and to publish, is precisely what education is meant to produce. The fact that it survives is the best evidence that what is being eroded has not yet been lost. Whether it lasts depends on whether its institutions are allowed to keep teaching it.Ashish Joshi is a former Civil Servant and member of Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) & Citizens for Fraternity (CFF).Harshita Khetarpal is an advocate enrolled with the Bar Council of Delhi and a graduate of Jindal Global Law School.