How Indian school education is quietly collapsing

Dipak Kurmi
If irony ever needed a permanent address, it would not reside on a ceremonial boulevard or behind the gates of a Government bungalow. It would quietly occupy an Indian school staff room, wedged between a fraying attendance register and a biometric machine that stubbornly refuses to recognise the very fingerprints that sustain the system. In a civilisation that venerates learning and ritualistically describes teachers as Nation-builders, the Indian schoolteacher has been subjected to a curious re-invention. Stripped of time, autonomy and authority, the teacher has been transformed into one of the most over qualified and under-utilised clerks the State has ever produced. This is not the result of accidental neglect; it is the consequence of an administrative imagination that has mistaken compliance for competence.
The modern Indian teacher’s workday reveals the depth of this distortion. Why confine a trained educator to the inconvenience of teaching when they can be more “productively” deployed filling forms, feeding digital portals, chasing signatures, uploading data, supervising mid-day meals, managing elections, conducting surveys and responding to incessant official circulars ? The old proverb reminds us that when the axe forgets, the tree remembers, and Indian teachers remember everything. They remember the hours spent navigating portals that crash under their own inefficiency, the endless passwords and OTPs, the deadlines that arrive with bureaucratic urgency but without logistical support. Each task is justified as essential, temporary or unavoidable, yet together they form a permanent architecture of distraction.
There was a time when a teacher’s professional tool-kit was elegantly simple: chalk, books and an enquiring mind. Today, it resem- bles that of a junior bureaucrat. Spreadsheets replace lesson plans, dashboards overshadow blackboards, and compliance formats dictate the rhythm of the day. Teachers are expected to multitask with the efficiency of corporate executives and the obedience of clerical staff, all while being compensated and respected as if they were interchangeable accessories. This transformation is not merely bur- densome; it is conceptually flawed. A profession entrusted with shaping young minds cannot thrive when its practitioners are denied the intellectual space to think, reflect and teach. The State entrusts teachers with the future, yet withholds the dignity necessary to engage meaningfully with students.
The inevitable casualty of this arrangement is the classroom itself. Once a space of dialogue, curiosity and discovery, it has been quietly demoted to an interruption in a day dominated by administrative survival. Teachers spend more time validating data than nurturing ideas, more time forma- ting reports than forming values. The irony is cruelly precise: the system measures everything except lear-ning. From census duty to election deployment, teachers have become a convenient and compliant instrument of the State. When a professional salary is paid for clerical obedience, what emerges is not educational reform but an overqualified filing cabinet, meticulously organised and profoundly misused.
What turns this bureaucratic farce into a deeper tragedy is the moral sermon that accompanies it. Teachers are repeatedly reminded that theirs is a noble profession, a phrase deployed with suspicious regularity whenever salaries stagnate and workloads swell. Nobility, in this context, functions less as recognition and more as anaesthesia. It dulls protest while legitimising exploitation. Yet nobility does not pay EMIs, cure burnout or conjure inspired lesson plans after hours lost to data entry. The invocation of sacrifice becomes a convenient shield behind which systemic inefficiency hides, absolving policy-makers of the obligation to create humane working conditions.
Predictably, when students struggle or learning outcomes falter, accountability travels in only one direction. Teachers are summoned to workshops, ins- pections multiply and new pedagogical acronyms are introduced with ceremonial enthusiasm. What remains untouched is the structural reality that fractures the teacher’s attention and energy.
(To be contd)