Equitable Access to Higher Education: An Analysis of India’s National Education Policy (2020) in a Post-Pandemic World

Abstract

Of the various less-than-comfortable narrative strands of the status quo that the COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in showing up in stark relief—our rather troubling (if somewhat half-hearted) complacence about the systemic blind-spots that continue to colour the prevailing culture of a clearly inequitable higher education policy-framework—easily features among the most worrying, and thus, among those precise pulse-points that carry tremendous potential to help build the post-pandemic reset better, stronger and palpably fairer.¹ In this piece, the authors endeavour to elaborate upon this and supplement the same with a brief analysis of India’s year-old National Education Policy, 2020²—and how this nation (India) of more than 1.3 billion,³ supposedly poised on the cusp of a massive self-reinvention—is attempting to embark upon this journey.