India’s school system faces a dual challenge: ensuring that essential physical infrastructure is universally available in government schools while simultaneously regulating a private ecosystem that often treats education as a market commodity rather than a fundamental right. As a Principal Product Manager focusing on large-scale digital education platforms, I recognize that achieving Viksit Bharat requires reformatting the education sector through mandatory transparency, robust governance, and leveraging digital infrastructure to deliver high-quality, affordable learning for every child
1. The Critical Foundation: Why School Infrastructure Still Matters
Even in an age where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital content are ubiquitous, learning must still happen in an enabling environment. Infrastructure is not just about buildings; it defines the conditions under which teachers operate and students learn with dignity.
The Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) tracks over 1.5 million schools on inputs like buildings, classrooms, toilets, electricity, internet access, libraries, and playgrounds. Critically, these physical inputs strongly correlate with student attendance, retention, and ultimate learning outcomes.
However, significant gaps persist, particularly in rural and low-income areas, which are far more likely to lack libraries, labs, and safe buildings, and still report issues like missing or unusable toilets or limited electricity.
For a Principal Product Manager, this means digital innovation cannot be designed in isolation. Our content, assessments, and AI tools must account for:
Low-bandwidth and shared-device contexts.
Offline-first experiences that sync data only when connectivity is available.
Physical infrastructure signals (from UDISE+) to prioritize where support, like printed material or community digital kiosks, is most urgently needed.
2. The Commodification Crisis: How the Private School Ecosystem Works
Over the past two decades, many Indian families have shifted towards private schooling, often motivated by the perception of better infrastructure, English exposure, and exam results. Yet, this growing private ecosystem is riddled with structural issues that undermine universal access.
A significant portion of the private sector increasingly behaves less like a learning institution and more like a real-estate-plus-branding business. This shift means education moves from being a right to a market commodity. Key structural issues include:
Fee Escalation and Opacity: Investigations across multiple states have highlighted steep annual fee hikes, the imposition of non-transparent “development fees,” and excessive “technology charges” which place immense pressure on family budgets.
Staffing Quality Concerns: Studies on teacher education indicate that even some high-fee schools employ under-qualified or poorly paid teachers, often on temporary contracts, while they simultaneously invest heavily in façade infrastructure and marketing campaigns.
RTE Tensions: Private unaided schools are mandated by the Right to Education (RTE) Act to reserve 25% of seats for economically weaker sections. However, many schools report resistance to these admissions, often complaining of delayed state reimbursements, which they may compensate for by imposing higher fees on other parents.
User Story 1: Screening for Capacity to Pay
One of the most concerning systemic practices is the screening of parents based on their financial capacity, which directly undermines the spirit of universal access and the RTE Act,.
Evidence of Systemic Pattern: Media reports and parent testimonies describe schools demanding parents’ PAN cards, degree certificates, employment proof, and income details during admissions,. This practice serves primarily to screen the parents' "ability to pay" or "social profile" rather than assessing the child’s learning needs.
Lived Experience (Metro City): A mid-income family in a metropolitan area observed that the fees at their “mid-tier” private school had increased by over 150% in a decade, far outpacing their salary growth. During the admission process, they were asked for their IT returns and degree certificates—information which served more to prove their financial capacity than to evaluate the suitability of the school for the child.
Lived Experience (RTE Segregation): Parents whose children secured RTE seats often narrate instances where their children were informally segregated, discouraged from participating in co-curricular activities, and subtly pushed out of the system over time, despite clear legal protections against discrimination.
These admission practices, such as demanding salary slips or corporate designations at the shortlisting stage, are difficult to reconcile with the RTE Act, which positions education as a fundamental right for children aged 6–14 and mandates non-discriminatory access.
3. The Path to Transparency: Unlocking UDISE+ as a Public Mirror
The government’s Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) is India’s central platform for collecting school education data, covering both government and private institutions. It meticulously collects data on infrastructure, enrollment demographics, and, crucially, teacher counts, qualifications, training, and appointments.
While UDISE+ has improved government accountability and planning, its true transformative power lies in opening this mirror to parents and communities in a usable form.
The Parent’s Right to Know
Parents have a legitimate right to know whether the institution they choose employs appropriately qualified staff and adheres to regulatory norms. Opening a parent-facing layer of UDISE+ could achieve this transparency by displaying:
Basic School Facts: Recognition status, medium of instruction, and actual Pupil-Teacher Ratios (PTR).
Aggregate Teacher Information: The total number of teachers, the proportion holding professional qualifications, years of experience, and the percentage who have completed mandatory government training (such as NISHTHA. CPD modules).
Fee and Compliance Flags: Integration with state recognition and fee-regulation systems could reveal declared fee bands and flag compliance issues.
This transparency does not require exposing the sensitive personal data of individual teachers. By extending public summary statistics down to the school level and making the data readable in simple language, we can significantly strengthen informed parental choice and community oversight.
4. Education Is Universal: The Role of Bureaucracy and Governance
Laws like the RTE Act and schemes like Samagra Shiksha demonstrate clear policy intent, but the challenge remains in the day-to-day enforcement across 1.5 million schools. The bureaucracy must transition from being merely a controlling body to an enabling guardian of universal rights.
Bureaucratic efficiency can be radically improved by:
Shifting to Real-Time Digital Oversight: Using UDISE+ as a "living EMIS" (Education Management Information System), allowing for real-time updates on enrolment, dropouts, and infrastructure issues, which guides immediate, targeted support rather than relying on annual audits.
Standardising and Publishing Norms: Clear, standardized lists of documents that schools can and cannot demand during admission must be published widely on government portals and community boards.
Protecting Parent Collectives: Establishing anonymous complaint mechanisms and time-bound investigation protocols for grievances such as unauthorized fee hikes or non-compliance with staffing norms. A grievance portal linked to UDISE+ could track patterns, alerting District Education Officers to schools with frequent complaints or persistent violations.
Done effectively, governance acts as the conscience of the system, aligning the actions of both public and private institutions with the idea that every child matters.
5. The Digital Equalizer: Making Education Affordable and Reachable
Digital public platforms, coupled with cooperative private innovation, offer the strongest mechanism to democratise access and counteract the market power of high-fee private schools.
Large-scale digital platforms make education affordable and reachable by achieving near-zero marginal cost per learner. Unlike building parallel coaching or private school capacity, one AI platform can serve millions of learners without significant extra cost per child.
Key Ways Digital Platforms Lower Cost and Expand Reach:
AI-Driven Personalisation: Adaptive practice, doubt resolution, and competency tracking can be delivered to each learner regardless of their school type. District pilots, such as “PadhaiWithAI” in Tonk, Rajasthan, used AI-driven, curriculum-aligned math practice to provide personalised questions and feedback, improving pass rates within weeks without needing additional, costly tutors.
Low-Cost Access and Devices: Solutions built on voice and conversational AI can deliver lessons and quizzes even over basic 2G networks in local languages, overcoming literacy and smartphone barriers. Solutions that prioritise mobile-first and offline/online hybrid design reduce the need for expensive devices, data plans, and travel to coaching centres.
Teacher Capacity Building: By providing automated assessments and ready-to-use content, AI strengthens government schools, reducing the pressure on families to shift to high-fee private institutions solely for quality. Platforms like those used to facilitate NISHTHA-style training can be delivered digitally, potentially with AI-powered coaching, to ensure even small schools have competent instruction. For example, AI-powered lesson planners can act as curriculum-aware co-teachers, helping rural administrators ensure teachers prepare detailed, concept-driven lessons aligned to syllabus expectations, without increasing their workload.
User Story 2: Improving Outcomes via AI Affordability
Evidence of Affordability and Impact: The Tonk district pilot, “PadhaiWithAI,” focused on improving math scores in government schools.
Scale and Result: This low-cost model was rolled out across 351–353 government senior secondary schools, covering around 11,000 to 12,000 Class 10 students. Within just one exam cycle (following a common revision calendar over about six weeks), the Class 10 maths pass rate reached 96.4%. This was about 3 percentage points higher than the previous year and exceeded the state-level improvement, proving the effectiveness of low-cost, personalised, AI-driven practice.
This demonstration proves that high-quality, personalised learning, traditionally confined to expensive private tuition, can be made universally available via low-cost digital platforms.
6. Towards Vikshit Bharat: Reformatting Education
For India to move towards Viksit Bharat by 2047, the necessary reforms must fundamentally shift the power dynamics and cultural perception of education.
We must reformat education by:
Re-centring Accountability: Accountability must measure learning outcomes, inclusivity, and well-being, not just façade infrastructure, board results, and campus branding.
Re-defining Value in Private Schooling: Regulatory frameworks must reward transparent, norm-compliant schools that genuinely invest in teacher development, and severely restrict exploitative practices that prey on parents' aspirations.
Re-imagining Public-Private Balance: When government schools are trusted, robust, and supported by strong digital platforms, they keep the entire education system honest. Private schools are then forced to compete on the basis of real educational value rather than exclusivity or market leverage.
Re-wiring EMIS and AI: UDISE+ data, combined with AI analytics, must become the nervous system of school education, providing continuous, targeted insights back to administrators, head teachers, and crucially, parents, thereby improving daily decisions and systemic performance.
