Words and numbers

India's education policy needs to be both more & less ambitious

One of the besetting sins of Indian policy making has always been an excess of ambition. Policy is only rarely written for the actual constraints of implementation in the Indian context — a chronic shortage of resources, poor monitoring and supervision capacity, political differences, and delays in funding. Sometimes this combines with a fundamental misdiagnosis of the immediate and most severe problems holding back progress, or with a refusal to accept reality.

It is in the light of this tendency that one should read the National Education Policy, which was released last week by the Union government. The importance of