Social policy: education, health & affirmative action
India's post-1947 social policy: educational expansion, public health architecture, and the constitutional machinery of affirmative action through Mandal.
The constitutional foundation of education
Independent India inherited a mass-illiteracy crisis: the 1951 Census recorded a literacy rate of 18.33 percent. The Constitution responded with Article 45 (Directive Principle), which directed the State to provide free and compulsory education for all children until they completed the age of 14, originally to be achieved within ten years of the Constitution's commencement in 1950. That deadline was repeatedly missed; the obligation was finally hardened into a fundamental right only by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, which inserted Article 21A, operationalised through the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (in force 1 April 2010).
Building the higher-education and scientific edifice
The Nehruvian state prioritised the apex over the base. The University Grants Commission was established by statute in 1956 to coordinate and maintain standards. The first Indian Institute of Technology was founded at Kharagpur in 1951 (formally incorporated by the IIT Act, 1956 as an Institute of National Importance), with Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Delhi following through the 1950s and 1960s, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences by the AIIMS Act, 1956, and the Indian Institutes of Management at Calcutta and Ahmedabad in 1961. This top-heavy investment built world-class research capacity but left primary education under-funded for decades.
The committee tradition
Indian education policy advanced through landmark commissions. The University Education Commission (1948-49) under S. Radhakrishnan addressed higher learning. The Secondary Education Commission (1952-53) under A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar restructured the school stage. Most consequential was the Education Commission (1964-66) chaired by D. S. Kothari, whose report 'Education and National Development' produced the National Policy on Education, 1968. The Kothari Commission recommended the common 10+2+3 structure, the three-language formula, and the still-unmet target of devoting six percent of GDP to education. A revised National Policy on Education followed in 1986 (modified 1992), launching Operation Blackboard and the District Primary Education Programme. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was launched in 2001 to universalise elementary education, and the National Education Policy 2020 replaced the 1986 framework with a 5+3+3+4 structure.
The persistence of the gap
Despite these instruments, outcomes lagged commitments. The midday meal scheme, mandated nationally after the Supreme Court's interim orders in People's Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India (the Right to Food case, 2001), tied nutrition to enrolment. Yet the six-percent-of-GDP target set in 1968 remains unrealised more than five decades later, and the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has repeatedly documented learning deficits even as enrolment approached universality. The Indian experience illustrates a recurring policy lesson: access expanded faster than quality, and constitutional aspiration outran fiscal commitment.