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.
