Ashutosh Arke
India’s silent walls stand not as mere metaphors but as fortified ramparts of the Brahmanical order—walls built on centuries of caste tyranny, gender subjugation, and class exploitation. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar taught us that “education is the only tool by which you can dismantle the prison-house of caste.” Yet in today’s India, our schools and universities too often serve as factories of subordination, reproducing the hierarchy Ambedkar vowed to annihilate. The hollow promise of laws like the RTE Act and lofty policy declarations of NEP 2020 ring empty when Dalit and Adivasi children are segregated in classrooms, denied water at hand pumps, and mocked for their very names. When students from tribal communities are forced to recite lessons in alien tongues, and Dalit scholars meet institutional silence in the face of violence, it becomes clear that the state’s “welfare” is nothing but a veneer over entrenched oppression.
The RTE Paradox: Laws on Paper, Void in Practice
In post-colonial India, the vision of its founding architects was of a welfare state committed to social justice, economic development, and equal opportunity. Yet, despite legal guarantees and numerous welfare schemes, the dream of an equitable India remains unfulfilled for many. The Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009, though a major legislative step, has struggled in implementation due to infrastructural deficits, low teacher-student ratios, discriminatory classroom practices, and inadequate funding. Children from Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), often first-generation students, face barriers in the form of linguistic alienation, humiliation from upper-caste teachers or peers, and the burden of domestic labour or wage work. The quality of education, especially in rural government schools, remains poor. Many tribal areas lack even basic school buildings, let alone trained teachers or access to digital resources. Language barriers in Adivasi belts further alienate children from mainstream curricula. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted these inequalities, with online learning exposing the digital divide—millions of students lacked access to smartphones, internet, or electricity. As urban children shifted to Zoom classes, rural and marginalised children dropped out or were pushed further into educational darkness.
Caste as Curriculum: When Education Reinforces Exclusion
Recent global research underscores that India’s educational inequalities are part of broader patterns seen across low-income countries, where poverty, marginalisation, and learning deficits often reinforce one another. The volume Learning, Marginalization, and Improving the Quality of Education in Low-Income Countries (Wagner, Castillo, & Lewis, 2022) highlights how marginalised students—especially in rural, linguistically diverse, or socially excluded communities—face a compounded set of challenges. These include not only infrastructural deficits and teacher shortages, but also deeper issues such as curricular irrelevance, language barriers, and a lack of pedagogical adaptability to local needs. The authors emphasise the need for “inclusive learning systems” that recognise learners’ social contexts, promote equity-focused policy design, and challenge narrow, test-driven notions of educational success.
In the Indian context, these insights resonate strongly, particularly in the Adivasi regions, where children are taught in unfamiliar languages, and in Dalit localities where cultural alienation and exclusion shape students’ daily experiences. For instance, in Jharkhand’s Dumka district, tribal children who speak Santhali or Ho at home struggle to comprehend textbooks written in Hindi or English, often leading to disengagement and dropout. In Maharashtra’s Beed district, Dalit girls have reported being made to sit separately in classrooms, denied drinking water, or mocked by teachers using casteist slurs—all under the shadow of implicit bias that remains unaddressed by school authorities.
The persistence of caste-based inequality, despite constitutional safeguards, reveals the depth of India’s social stratification. Dalits and Adivasis continue to face not just economic deprivation but social humiliation and violence. Manual scavenging, bonded labour, caste-based sexual violence, and exclusion from temples or water sources still exist in many parts of the country. The 2016 case of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad, tragically illustrates how institutional apathy and caste discrimination can break even the brightest spirits. His suicide note became a symbol of how deep-rooted caste hierarchies within elite educational spaces can rob students of their dignity, mental health, and will to live.
Similarly, Payal Tadvi, a tribal medical student in Mumbai, ended her life in 2019 after months of caste-based harassment by her seniors in a reputed government hospital. Despite excelling academically, her tribal identity became a target for ridicule, abuse, and exclusion—exposing how even highly competitive spaces remain bastions of social exclusion.
These examples are not isolated incidents but part of a larger pattern where marginalised students face systemic neglect. While reservations in education and employment have opened some doors, they have not dismantled the entrenched cultural logic of caste hierarchy. Equality, therefore, is not merely about legal access but about transforming the social and psychological environment in which students are allowed to exist, learn, and flourish with dignity.
Hidden Deprivations: The Depth of India’s Poverty
The poorest in India are often also the most marginalised Dalits, Adivasis, landless labourers, women-headed households, and the disabled. According to the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), India has made strides in reducing poverty in absolute numbers, yet the depth of deprivation remains high. The burden of poverty is disproportionately borne by women, who often face the double burden of unpaid domestic labour and low-paid informal work. Migrant labourers, especially after the COVID lockdown, were pushed to the brink of starvation and destitution, revealing the fragility of India’s economic safety net. Urban slums and rural hamlets alike are marked by a lack of sanitation, healthcare, secure livelihoods, and educational opportunities. Take the story of 13-year-old Savita from a Dalit basti in rural Madhya Pradesh. After schools shut during the pandemic, her family couldn’t afford a smartphone, and she began working as a farm labourer alongside her mother. When schools reopened, she didn’t return. She had become a full-time wage worker—another childhood lost to poverty. Children like Savita face a compounded disadvantage—malnutrition, poor health, lack of early childhood education, and exposure to violence or hazardous labour—trapping them in a cycle of poverty from which it is incredibly hard to escape.
Education, when genuinely inclusive, can break this cycle. Yet access is deeply stratified. Elite schools and coaching institutes cater to the urban upper-middle class, while government schools, despite noble intentions, often fail to deliver basic learning outcomes. The quality gap between private and public schooling is vast, reinforcing class divisions. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promises reforms, including mother-tongue instruction and vocational training, but critics argue that it lacks concrete mechanisms to ensure equity. Moreover, with increasing privatisation of education, access becomes more market-driven, excluding the poor and marginalised. Even higher education, which should serve as a ladder of upward mobility, is increasingly being priced beyond the reach of the marginalised, pushing them into debt or forcing them to drop out.
Missing from the Margins: Though, NEP 2020 articulates ambitious goals, it falls short in addressing the structural barriers faced by marginalised communities. NEP 2020 lacks a concrete strategy for implementing equity-focused reforms, especially in regions historically excluded from quality education. Simultaneously, the growing trend of privatisation—coupled with declining public investment—threatens to widen existing inequalities. Private schools and higher education institutions, often unaffordable to Dalits, Adivasis, and economically disadvantaged groups, create parallel systems that favour the privileged. As education becomes increasingly commodified, affordability and accessibility remain major concerns, particularly in higher education where loans and rising fees discourage participation from marginalised students. Without robust safeguards against exclusion and profit-driven models, both NEP 2020 and the privatisation wave risk reinforcing the very hierarchies they seek to dismantle.
Reimagining Education as Liberation: Reimagining education as a liberatory force requires a radical shift in how we define success and merit. Dominant ideas of merit, often rooted in privilege and exclusion, must give way to inclusive frameworks that recognise lived experiences, community knowledge, and diverse ways of learning. Inclusive pedagogy must embrace local languages, culturally relevant content, and participatory teaching methods that empower rather than alienate. Education should not merely prepare individuals for the job market but serve as a means of healing, dignity, and social transformation—challenging oppressive structures and enabling marginalised communities to reclaim their voice, identity, and rightful place in society.
Ambedkarite Awakening: Redefining Empowerment through Resistance
True empowerment, as envisioned by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, is not gifted by benevolent structures but seized through a conscious struggle against oppression. At the grassroots level, Ambedkarite movements have emerged as powerful countercurrents to caste hegemony, asserting that social justice cannot be achieved without dismantling the Brahmanical order that shapes India’s institutions—including its education system. These movements, led by Dalit and Adivasi communities, reject tokenistic inclusion and demand a radical reimagining of education as a tool of emancipation, not assimilation.
Inspired by Ambedkar’s call to “educate, agitate, and organise,” Dalit youth today are not only resisting systemic exclusion but creating alternative intellectual spaces that center their lived realities. Across rural and urban India, Ambedkarite collectives and community-led schools have emerged, rejecting casteist curricula and asserting the right to learn with dignity. Through mass mobilisations, cultural assertions, and legal interventions, these movements challenge the state’s failure to uphold constitutional promises of equality.
This awakening has also taken digital form. Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi youth are reclaiming narrative spaces through blogs, YouTube platforms, podcasts, and social media, confronting Savarna-dominated academia and media. These digital forums function as classrooms of resistance, where counter-histories are written, caste is critiqued, and collective solidarity is forged. From Ambedkarite book clubs in bastis to poetry slams that deconstruct caste violence, education is being redefined—not merely as classroom attendance, but as a process of reclaiming history, dignity, and the future.
In the Ambedkarite tradition, education is not neutral—it is political. It is about asserting one’s humanity in a society that has systematically denied it. These movements do not seek to fit into the existing structures but to transform them—questioning whose knowledge is legitimised, whose voices are heard, and whose futures are imagined. The struggle for education, then, becomes a struggle for annihilating caste itself.
Conclusion
India’s educational landscape mirrors its deep-rooted social inequalities. While laws and policies promise inclusion, caste, class, and gender continue to dictate access, quality, and dignity in education. Marginalised communities—Dalits, Adivasis, women, and the poor—face systemic barriers that education alone cannot overcome without broader structural reform. True transformation demands not only more schools but more justice: curricula that reflect diverse lived realities, institutions that nurture rather than exclude, and a society that values every learner equally. Breaking India’s silent walls requires a sustained commitment to equity, dignity, and the collective reimagining of education as a tool for liberation, not assimilation.
References
Wagner, D. A., Castillo, N. M., & Lewis, S. G. (Eds.). (2022). Learning, marginalization, and improving the quality of education in low-income countries (2nd ed.) [PDF]. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
Azim Premji University. (2021). Loss of learning during the pandemic. Retrieved from https://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in
Government of India. (2009). The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. Ministry of Human Resource Development.
Guru, G., & Sarukkai, S. (2012). The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Oxford University Press.
Ministry of Education. (2020). National Education Policy 2020. Government of India. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.in
NITI Aayog & UNDP. (2021). National Multidimensional Poverty Index: Baseline Report. Government of India. Retrieved from https://www.niti.gov.in
Teltumbde, A. (2018). Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. Navayana.
Thorat, S., & Newman, K. S. (2010). Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India. Oxford University Press.
Vemula, R. (2016). Caste is not a rumour: The online life of Rohith Vemula. Round Table India. Retrieved from https://roundtableindia.co.in
UNICEF India. (2020). Impact of COVID-19 on Children in India. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/india
~~~
Ashutosh Arke is an HR professional based in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. He holds a Master’s degree in Social Work with a specialization in Human Resource Management from Pondicherry University.
