Neo-liberalisation of Education in India
India’s education system has shifted dramatically over the past four decades, embodying neoliberalism’s push to turn public goods into profit centres. David Harvey, a renowned British Marxist geographer and scholar of urban political economy, explains this through his concept of “accumulation by dispossession”; policies that privatise public assets for private gain. Some readers may see left-leaning bias here, however, this analysis draws from clear policy facts and Harvey’s economic framework, not ideology; this is just how neoliberalism works.
Neoliberalism cannot simply be defined as an economic doctrine but is instead a “political project to achieve restoration of class power.” Rather than producing sustained economic growth it promised, neoliberalism has orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the economic elite through deregulation, privatisation, and what can be termed as “accumulation by dispossession.” Unlike classical Marxian primitive accumulation, which occurred as capitalism’s historical origin, accumulation by dispossession is an ongoing process central to contemporary capitalism. It involves the commodification and privatisation of assets once held in common, the expropriation of wealth through financial mechanisms, and the forcible removal of people from means of subsistence.
In India’s education sector, this process unfolded systematically. The National Policy on Education (1986) initiated the neoliberal assault by creating parallel, inferior education streams and non-formal education for the poor while establishing almost a different stream for the elite. The 1991 economic liberalisation, driven by structural adjustment pressures, accelerated this trajectory. India’s 1995 signing of the World Trade Organisation’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) marked a critical threshold; education ceased to be a constitutional right and became a “tradeable service.” When right to education is considered a fundamental right from ages 6 to 14 this single act transformed education’s legal status from public good to commodity.
The mechanics of accumulation through dispossession in Indian education operate through four interconnected processes. First, commodification has systematised the transformation of education into a market product. Where education is just limited to some sort of a vocational training which is meant to produce a trained workforce, absolutely ignoring that education is also meant to develop and optimise human potential. The Ambani-Birla Report (2000) with its prime production view ignoring any humane aspect by proposing ending subsidised education and implementing a “user-pay” principle, it explicitly articulated the neoliberal logic that education should generate private profit. The National Education Policy 2020, while framed as progressive, took a lot of the recommendations of this report towards commodification through multiple pathways. It introduced modular, credit-based systems; it reduces holistic learning to fragments of tradable knowledge units, mirroring capitalist production’s logic of just-in-time manufacturing. Students become consumers, learning becomes a transactional exchange.
Second, privatisation has created a bifurcated system stratifying access by class. Private school enrolment has expanded from 30% (2012-13) to 35% (2021-22) nationally, with concentrated peaks in urban areas. Delhi records 46% private school share, while states like Jharkhand remain at 3.5%. It is pertinent to mention here that not even all private schools are equal. There is a greater disparity between elite and expensive private schools and low cost badly run private schools both in rural and urban areas with lower social economic status. The “learning crisis” literature by researchers at the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank based in Washington DC, for India shows that years of schooling have increased but learning per year of schooling has not, implying declining or stagnant productivity of the public system. As public education quality has declined, private schools both elite and “low-fee” proliferated to capture the ensuing demand, extract surplus from families desperate for alternatives. The Global Education Industry (GEI) has penetrated India, with multinational corporations, venture capital, and philanthropies treating India’s poor as profit frontiers.
Third, financialisation has shifted higher education costs from state to individual households, proletarianising educational access. Delhi University’s revenue from student fees exceeded ₹200 crore in fiscal 2023-24, with institutions increasingly dependent on fee income as UGC grants stagnate. The proposed Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) replaces grants with loans, effectively privatising finance while maintaining state legitimacy. This transforms education into debt, particularly burdensome for SC/ST/OBC students already marginalised historically.
Fourth, datafication represents neoliberalism’s latest enclosure. The NEP 2020’s Academic Bank of Credit (ABC) and Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR), linked to Aadhaar (India’s biometric ID), centralises student data. While framed as convenience, commodifies student information for corporate marketing, and fragments learning into discrete, tractable data points. Students become generators of data within systems optimising for efficiency and profit. India also faces several structural data protection issues as our core framework rests on the DPDP Act, 2023 and legacy provisions in the Information Technology Act, 2000, which still leaves sector specific rules fragmented and sometimes inconsistent.
These mechanisms consolidate class power in education systematically. The poorest 80% of Indians remain trapped in under resourced schools, and students from scheduled tribes, scheduled castes and Muslim communities are still far less likely than others to reach and complete senior secondary or higher education. Meanwhile, elite private schools produce graduates competing in global markets. This segregation is not accidental but structural. Neoliberalism explicitly fragments “comprehensive” public education (which briefly promised universality) into stratified systems serving different classes.
Knowledge capitalism intensifies this pattern. Universities now highly prioritise market-oriented disciplines (engineering, business) while systematically devaluing humanities and social sciences that foster critical consciousness. Faculties have been increasingly pressured toward publication metrics, patent production, and industry partnerships rather than public intellectualism. Teachers’ agency is also increasingly eroded with continuous contractualisations which strips them of job security and autonomy. This process mirrors insight that neoliberalism deploys the state to enforce market discipline while appearing to reduce state power.
The Indian state’s role exemplifies this paradox. The government unilaterally implemented NEP 2020 without parliamentary debate, deployed Supreme Court judgments favouring private education, and closed student unions, while claiming to reduce state intervention. The state strengthens market imperatives through coercive legislation while dismantling spaces for democratic dialogue.
India’s Constitution (Articles 14, 15, 45) mandated free, equitable, non-discriminatory education. By systematically privatising education since 1986, the Indian state has formally abandoned these commitments under neoliberalism’s pressure. Resistance exists but remains fragmented. Unlike earlier movements centered on class struggle and Common School System demands, contemporary resistance often splits into identity-based (caste, gender) or institutional (legal, NGO) approaches that, while important, deflect from capitalism’s fundamental logic of accumulation. As the economist Ravi Kumar argues, alternatives must centre on the “capital-state-education matrix,” recognising that genuine equity requires not minor reforms but dismantling the project itself.
Conclusion:
Education remains a contested terrain where capital’s relentless drive to convert all life into commodities confronts emancipatory possibilities. Harvey’s accumulation-by-dispossession framework illuminates how neoliberalism operates through state mediated privatisation of commons, financialisation of access, and reproduction of class power. In India, this has meant transforming a constitutional promise of universal education into a differentiated, market-governed system where the poor are systematically dispossessed of educational opportunity.
Resisting this requires building what is termed as “counter-hegemonic discourse” organising education around principles of democracy, equity, and collective liberation rather than individual consumption. This demands substantial public investment, fee regulation, strong public universities insulated from market pressure, and crucially, restoration of education’s role as a site for developing critical consciousness and challenging systemic oppression. Only through such systemic transformation can education reclaim its status as a fundamental right rather than a commodity available only to those with purchasing power.
Dawar Ashraf Mir is an entrepreneur managing infrastructure and agricultural ventures in Kashmir. He is also a fellow of the Ananta Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN)
