Author: Smile Foundation

In India’s education discourse, scholarships are often spoken of with a sense of finality. Fees paid, barriers removed and futures unlocked. The assumption is neat and reassuring: that once financial access is secured, merit and effort will do the rest. But the evidence from classrooms, campuses and hostels across the country suggests otherwise. For a large proportion of first-generation learners, scholarships are not a bridge to opportunity so much as an incomplete map—useful, but insufficient to navigate unfamiliar terrain.

This gap between intent and outcome deserves closer attention, especially as India expands its scholarship architecture in pursuit of higher enrolment, equity and social mobility.

Access is not the same as capability

India has made measurable progress in widening access to education. Enrolment rates at the secondary and higher education levels have improved, and public and private scholarship schemes now reach millions of students. However, access alone does not translate into success. Dropout rates among first-generation learners remain stubbornly high, particularly at transition points—after Class 8, after Class 10 and during the first year of college.

The reason lies not in a lack of aspiration, but in a mismatch between what scholarships cover and what students actually need. Fees are only one component of educational participation. Equally critical are academic preparedness, language confidence, institutional navigation, mental well-being and a sense of belonging—factors that rarely appear in financial ledgers but decisively shape outcomes.

Economists have long argued that education should be viewed not as an input, but as a capability. Without the conditions that allow students to convert access into achievement, scholarships risk becoming symbolic gestures rather than engines of mobility.

The invisible barriers first-generation learners face

For students whose parents have never completed formal education, entry into secondary school or college is often accompanied by profound uncertainty. Administrative processes—forms, deadlines, documentation—can become obstacles in themselves. Academic culture, particularly in English-medium institutions, demands linguistic and social fluency that many students have not had the chance to develop.

Beyond the classroom, family pressures exert a constant pull. Economic precarity means that education competes with the immediate need to earn. Girls, in particular, face additional constraints: household responsibilities, concerns around safety, early marriage and the persistent undervaluing of their education.

Mental health stressors compound these challenges. Feelings of inadequacy, isolation and fear of failure are common among scholarship recipients who find themselves in environments far removed from their social realities. When these pressures go unaddressed, financial support alone cannot prevent attrition.

What the data quietly tells us

National surveys and independent studies increasingly point to this pattern. Research on higher education retention shows that students from marginalised backgrounds are more likely to drop out despite receiving financial aid. International evidence mirrors this finding: scholarships that combine monetary assistance with mentoring, academic support and psychosocial care consistently outperform those that do not.

In India, however, evaluation frameworks continue to prioritise disbursement over outcomes. Success is measured in terms of funds allocated or beneficiaries reached, rather than retention, completion or post-education trajectories. This narrow accounting obscures the role of non-financial support in determining whether scholarships fulfil their purpose.

Scholarships as systems, not transactions

Reframing scholarships as systems rather than transactions changes the policy conversation. It shifts the focus from how much money is given to how support is structured around the learner.

Non-financial interventions that matter include:

• Academic mentoring to address learning gaps and build confidence
• Language and communication support, especially in English-dominant institutions
• Psychosocial counselling to manage stress, identity conflict and anxiety
• Peer networks that reduce isolation and foster belonging
• Family engagement, particularly for girls, to sustain consent for continued education
• Institutional hand-holding to navigate examinations, internships and placements

These elements are not add-ons. They are integral to the conversion of access into capability.

The cost of ignoring non-financial support

When scholarship design overlooks these dimensions, the consequences are predictable. Students disengage quietly, often without formal withdrawal. Institutions interpret dropout as lack of merit or motivation. Policymakers respond by tweaking eligibility criteria or increasing allocations, without addressing the underlying causes.

The result is a cycle of partial success. Scholarships expand enrolment at the front end but fail to deliver mobility at the back end. For a country seeking to harness its demographic dividend, this is a costly inefficiency.

Learning from integrated models

Civil society organisations working at the grassroots have long recognised these gaps. Their experience suggests that sustained engagement, rather than one-time support, is what enables students to persist.

Smile Foundation’s education programmes illustrate this approach. Under its Mission Education initiative, scholarships are embedded within a broader framework that includes remedial learning, mentoring, health support and community engagement. This integrated model recognises that educational disadvantage is rarely singular. Addressing it requires attention to the social and emotional contexts in which learning occurs.

For adolescent girls, in particular, the Foundation’s interventions combine academic support with life skills, health awareness and family counselling. These measures help sustain participation during the years when dropout risks are highest. Crucially, the focus is not merely on keeping students enrolled, but on enabling them to imagine and plan for futures that education can realistically support.

Implications for policy and CSR

As India’s corporate sector increases its investment in education through CSR, the design of scholarship programmes warrants careful reconsideration. Too often, CSR-led scholarships mirror public schemes in focusing narrowly on financial assistance, driven by the imperatives of scale and reporting simplicity.

There is an opportunity here to do better. CSR initiatives, less constrained by bureaucratic rigidity, can pioneer models that integrate mentoring, academic support and mental health services into scholarship design. These models can generate evidence that informs public policy, demonstrating that non-financial support is not a luxury but a necessity.

From generosity to effectiveness

India’s commitment to educational equity is evident in the proliferation of scholarship schemes. What remains uncertain is whether this commitment will mature from generosity to effectiveness.

Ensuring that scholarships succeed requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: that financial aid, while essential, cannot compensate for structural disadvantage on its own. The real work lies in building ecosystems of support that accompany students through the long and uneven journey of education.

This is not an argument for reducing scholarships but one for completing them.

A more honest measure of success

If India is serious about using education as a tool for social mobility, it must ask harder questions of its scholarship programmes. Not how many students were funded, but how many graduated with skills. Not how much money was spent, but what capabilities were built. Not how many forms were processed, but how many lives were meaningfully transformed.

The answers to these questions will depend less on budgets than on design. Scholarships that recognise the full spectrum of barriers faced by first-generation learners stand a far better chance of delivering on their promise.

The rest, however well-intentioned, risk remaining unfinished bridges.

In 2025, education returned to the legislative foreground. Four laws — the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, the Delhi School Education Act, 2025, the Rajasthan Coaching Centres (Control and Regulation) Act, 2025 and the Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Bill, 2025 — were framed as correctives to long-standing distortions in India’s education system. Together, they addressed higher education regulation, school fee transparency, the unregulated coaching economy and governance in elite institutions.

Taken individually, each law responds to a real problem. Taken together, they reveal something more consequential: a reform imagination still rooted in governance, compliance and institutional control, while the everyday determinants of learning — attendance, foundational skills, teacher capacity, gendered barriers — remain largely outside the legislative frame.

The question, therefore, is not whether these laws were necessary. It is whether they are sufficient.

Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025: Order in a fragmented system

The most ambitious of the four, the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, proposes a unified higher education regulator, subsuming existing bodies such as the UGC and AICTE. The intent is to reduce regulatory overlap, improve quality assurance and align institutions with national development priorities.

For decades, India’s higher education sector has suffered from incoherence. Multiple regulators, inconsistent standards and procedural rigidity have diluted accountability. In that sense, consolidation is a logical step, and one that aligns with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s call for a streamlined regulatory architecture.

However, the Bill also raises familiar concerns. Centralisation, while efficient on paper, risks weakening institutional diversity if not accompanied by capacity-building. Autonomy granted in a vacuum often benefits institutions that are already well-resourced, while those serving disadvantaged populations struggle to comply with new benchmarks.

Crucially, the Bill’s impact on school education — where India’s learning crisis is most acute — is indirect. Weak higher education governance affects teacher training, curriculum design and research, but these are long-gestation reforms. They do little to address the immediate reality that millions of children are in school but not learning at grade level.

Delhi School Education Act, 2025: Transparency without transformation

The Delhi School Education Act, 2025, which focuses on transparency in the fixation and regulation of school fees, responds to growing public frustration over arbitrary fee hikes in private schools. By mandating disclosure and regulatory oversight, the law seeks to rebalance power between schools and parents.

In a city where families increasingly turn to private schools due to perceptions of better quality, fee regulation is politically salient.

The deeper problem lies in persistent distrust in government schools. Without parallel investments in public education — particularly in teacher support, infrastructure maintenance and learning outcomes — fee regulation risks treating symptoms rather than causes.

There is also the matter of low-fee private schools, which serve a significant number of first-generation learners. These schools operate on thin margins and often fill gaps left by the state. Regulatory compliance, without financial or technical support, may inadvertently shrink options for families already navigating constrained choices.

Rajasthan Coaching Centres (Control and Regulation) Act, 2025: A response to systemic failure

The Rajasthan Coaching Centres (Control and Regulation) Act, 2025, is perhaps the most candid acknowledgment of institutional failure. By regulating coaching centres, the State concedes what students and parents have long known: formal education systems are no longer trusted to prepare learners for competitive examinations.

The coaching industry did not grow in isolation. It expanded in response to curriculum–assessment mismatches, overcrowded classrooms and high-stakes examinations that reward rote mastery over conceptual understanding. Regulation — licensing, welfare norms and student safeguards — is overdue.

But regulation alone cannot dismantle the parallel system coaching has become. Unless school and university curricula are aligned with assessment systems, and unless mental health support is integrated into secondary education, coaching will remain a structural necessity rather than a supplement.

The law addresses exploitation, but not anxiety. It recognises risk, but not the pedagogical void that fuels demand.

Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Bill, 2025: Autonomy at the apex

The Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Bill, 2025, strengthens autonomy and revises governance structures in India’s most prestigious management institutions. The rationale is competitiveness: flexibility in appointments, curriculum design and global collaboration.

For elite institutions, autonomy can indeed enable innovation. But in a deeply unequal education system, autonomy at the top does little to address bottlenecks below. IIMs serve a minuscule fraction of India’s student population. Their success does not compensate for foundational learning deficits or access barriers elsewhere.

The Bill highlights a persistent asymmetry in reform: freedom for institutions that already function well, constraint for those grappling with basic capacity issues.

What these education laws reveal — and what they omit

Viewed together, the four laws reflect a consistent approach: education reform through regulation, governance and institutional restructuring. These are necessary levers, but they operate at a distance from the everyday realities of learning.

What remains largely absent from legislative focus are issues repeatedly flagged by data and field experience: foundational literacy and numeracy, chronic absenteeism, nutrition, mental health and the emotional labour of teachers.

ASER data continues to show that a significant proportion of children in upper primary grades struggle with basic reading and arithmetic. Attendance disruptions — driven by migration, unpaid care work, menstrual health challenges and climate events — compound learning loss, particularly for adolescent girls.

None of these feature prominently in the legal imagination of reform.

Where civil society bridges the gap

This is where civil society organisations offer a reality check. Working at the intersection of households, schools and communities, they encounter the limits of policy long before they appear in official reviews.

Smile Foundation’s Mission Education programme illustrates this gap between legislation and lived experience. Working with first-generation learners in urban slums and rural areas, the programme prioritises remedial education, small-group instruction and parental engagement — interventions that stabilise learning conditions rather than merely expanding access.

Learning improves not because of regulatory clarity, but because children are fed, healthy and emotionally supported. Attendance stabilises when healthcare and nutrition are integrated with schooling. Girls remain in school longer when household stress is reduced and mothers have access to livelihoods and healthcare, as seen through Smile Foundation’s Swabhiman programme.

These are not peripheral concerns but foundational.

Reform needs convergence, not compartments

The four laws treat higher education, school fees, coaching centres and elite institutions as discrete policy domains. Children experience them as a continuum.

A first-generation learner navigating an under-resourced primary school, a high-pressure secondary system and an expensive coaching market does not encounter separate reforms. She encounters one system — fragmented, unequal and demanding adaptation at every stage.

For reform to be meaningful, legislation must converge with investments in teacher support, child well-being and community engagement. Without this, governance reform risks remaining procedural rather than transformative.

Reform as unfinished work

The education laws of 2025 signal seriousness of intent. They acknowledge long-standing distortions and attempt to restore accountability. But they also expose the limits of reform that remains distant from classrooms.

Until legislation engages directly with the conditions that shape learning — poverty, gender norms, health, teacher capacity — the gap between policy intent and classroom reality will persist.

Civil society experience, including the work of organisations like Smile Foundation, demonstrates that change is possible when reform is grounded in lived realities. The task ahead is not merely to legislate better, but to ensure that laws enable learning where it matters most — in the daily lives of children and teachers.

Climate change, often described as a universal crisis, is neither neutral nor evenly distributed in its impacts. It moves through societies along existing fault lines of inequality, deepening them as it goes. Gender is one of the most consequential of these fault lines.

A report launched at COP28 by UN Women projects that by 2050, climate change could push an additional 158 million women and girls into poverty and expose 232 million more to food insecurity. These figures are not anomalies. They reflect a pattern that has become increasingly visible in climate-vulnerable regions across the world, including India. Climate change does not simply affect women more; it affects them differently, in ways that are often invisible to policy and poorly captured by data.

As Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, once put it, “Climate change is a man-made problem that requires a feminist solution.” The statement is not rhetorical but diagnostic.

Climate change as a stress test for inequality

Climate change acts less like a sudden catastrophe and more like a stress test. It reveals the weaknesses already embedded in social, economic and political systems. Wherever inequality is deep, climate impacts are magnified. Gender inequality, in particular, shapes who is exposed, who bears the burden of adaptation and who is able to recover.

Across the Global South, women are disproportionately concentrated in informal and climate-sensitive livelihoods: smallholder agriculture, waste picking, street vending, domestic work and home-based production. These sectors offer little job security, no insurance and minimal state protection. When heatwaves intensify, rainfall patterns shift or floods destroy local markets, women’s incomes are often the first to collapse and the slowest to rebound.

In India, where nearly 90 per cent of women workers are employed in the informal sector, climate shocks translate directly into economic precarity. Crop failure, water scarcity or extreme heat does not merely disrupt production; it destabilises household survival strategies, pushing women further into unpaid or underpaid labour.

The unpaid work that climate policy ignores

Perhaps the most under-recognised dimension of climate change is its impact on unpaid care work. Women continue to shoulder the bulk of domestic responsibilities—collecting water and fuel, cooking, cleaning and caring for children, the elderly and the sick. As climate stress intensifies, these responsibilities expand.

Water scarcity means longer walks and more time spent fetching water. Rising food prices increase the labour involved in securing and preparing meals. Climate-induced illness, whether from heat stress or waterborne disease, adds to caregiving demands. Each additional hour spent on unpaid work narrows women’s access to education, paid employment and political participation.

This erosion is gradual, cumulative and largely invisible. Climate policy, focused on emissions targets and infrastructure, rarely accounts for the time poverty that women experience as ecosystems degrade.

Extreme heat and invisible suffering

Heat is one of the clearest examples of climate change’s gendered impacts. In India, record-breaking heatwaves are becoming more frequent and prolonged. Women working outdoors—in agriculture, construction or waste collection—or in poorly ventilated factories and homes bear a disproportionate burden.

But women’s heat exposure is underreported. Many cope by limiting water intake to avoid unsafe or inaccessible sanitation facilities, increasing the risk of dehydration, urinary tract infections and kidney disease. Others continue working through exhaustion because informal employment offers no sick leave.

These coping strategies rarely appear in climate impact assessments. The health consequences—chronic fatigue, reproductive health complications, long-term organ damage—remain largely absent from official data, rendering women’s suffering statistically invisible.

A public health crisis with blind spots

Climate change has increasingly been recognised as a public health emergency. However, women’s health remains peripheral in climate adaptation planning. Heat stress, air pollution and water contamination have well-documented effects on pregnancy outcomes, maternal mortality and newborn health. Yet reproductive and maternal health services are seldom integrated into climate response strategies.

During climate-related disasters, access to contraception, antenatal care and safe childbirth services is often disrupted. Emergency shelters frequently lack privacy, sanitation and menstrual hygiene facilities. These gaps are not incidental; they reflect the persistent failure to view women’s health as central to climate resilience.

Displacement, insecurity and gendered violence

Climate-induced displacement introduces another layer of gender-specific risk. Floods, droughts and food shortages force families to migrate, often into precarious urban settlements or temporary camps. For women and girls, displacement increases exposure to sexual violence, trafficking and early marriage.

Evidence from humanitarian crises shows that domestic violence often rises during periods of climate stress, driven by economic insecurity, overcrowding and social breakdown. Yet climate policy continues to treat violence as a secondary issue, rather than a predictable outcome of environmental and economic disruption.

Why intersectionality matters

Gender does not operate in isolation. Indigenous women, migrant women, older women, women with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ individuals face layered vulnerabilities shaped by caste, class, ethnicity and geography. In India, tribal women dependent on forest resources are uniquely exposed to climate change, yet rarely consulted in conservation or adaptation planning.

When policies are designed around a narrow understanding of “women’s vulnerability,” they tend to protect those who are already relatively privileged. Intersectional realities remain unaddressed, leaving the most marginalised women further behind.

Women as agents, not victims

Despite these challenges, women are not passive victims of climate change. Across India and the Global South, women are leading adaptation efforts—through seed conservation, water management, community farming cooperatives and resistance to environmentally destructive projects.

Indigenous and rural women possess deep ecological knowledge shaped by daily interaction with land and resources. Yet this knowledge is frequently excluded from formal decision-making. Barriers such as unpaid care work, lack of access to finance, digital exclusion and limited political representation constrain women’s ability to influence climate policy.

Recognising women as climate actors requires more than representation. It demands policies that reduce structural burdens and redistribute resources.

What gender-responsive climate action requires

A gender-responsive approach to climate action must move beyond rhetoric. It requires tangible shifts in how adaptation and mitigation are financed and implemented.

This includes investing in inclusive social protection systems that account for climate risk, ensuring women’s access to land, credit and insurance, and supporting agrifood systems that are resilient and equitable. Data must be disaggregated by gender, age and social identity to inform policy. Climate finance should prioritise grassroots women’s organisations, which are often best positioned to deliver context-specific solutions.

Crucially, women must be involved in decision-making at every level—from local governance to national planning and global negotiations.

Civil society and community-led resilience

In India, civil society organisations play a critical role in translating these principles into practice. Smile Foundation’s Swabhiman programme offers an example of how gender-responsive approaches can be embedded at the community level.

Launched in 2005, Swabhiman works with marginalised women to improve nutrition, healthcare access and livelihood security—key pillars of climate resilience. By strengthening women’s economic independence and health awareness, the programme addresses vulnerabilities that climate change exacerbates.

Swabhiman’s community-based model recognises that resilience is not built through infrastructure alone, but through agency. By engaging men and boys alongside women, it also tackles the social norms that constrain women’s choices, making adaptation more sustainable.

Towards a just climate response

Climate change does not create gender inequality, but it relentlessly exploits it. The result is a slow, steady erosion of women’s health, livelihoods and dignity without immediate visibility.

If climate action continues to ignore gendered realities, it risks entrenching injustice under the guise of neutrality. A truly effective response must recognise that protecting the planet and advancing gender equality are not separate goals, but interdependent ones.

The evidence is clear that climate change is gender-biased. The real question is whether climate policy will continue to mirror existing inequalities, or whether it will confront them directly.

The answer will determine not only who survives climate change, but who shapes the future that follows.