On a summer afternoon in Bundelkhand, a woman labourer once stood in line at the local panchayat office clutching a job card. The wages she earned under MGNREGA were modest, yet transformative: regular income, freedom from feudal dependence, food security for her children, and a rare sense that the state recognised her dignity. That guarantee did not arrive as charity. It came as a right.
Two decades later, that moral and constitutional premise is under strain. The proposed New Education Bill, the newly enacted VB-G RAM G Act, the SabkaBimaSabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Bill, 2025, and the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill, 2025, taken together, mark not isolated policy shifts but a deeper reorientation of the Indian state – away from rights, decentralisation, and democratic accountability, and towards centralised control, market logic, and technocratic governance.
Education, employment, social security, and energy policy are not separate silos. Together, they shape citizenship. When all are restructured without consent, scrutiny, or constitutional humility, democracy itself is placed at risk.
Education, Justice, and the Constitution
Any serious education reform must begin by answering a fundamental question: what is education for? If this inquiry is evaded, reform risks becoming mere administrative rearrangement – or worse, social engineering.
For Mahatma Gandhi, education is never a factory for producing labour suited to industrial or state needs. Through NaiTalim, he envisions education as the formation of ethical, self-reliant citizens – rooted in dignity of labour, moral courage, and participatory self-rule (swaraj). An education system severed from these values, he warns, does not eliminate inequality; it merely modernises it.
A closely parallel vision emerges in Islamic intellectual thought, particularly in the work of Abul A’la Maududi. For him, education is not the mere transfer of knowledge but the holistic nurturing of intellect, ethics, and social responsibility. Knowledge divorced from moral accountability does not liberate society; it refines the tools of domination. Education, in this conception, exists not to secure obedience to power or markets, but to cultivate responsibility towards society and humanity.
These traditions – Gandhian and Islamic – converge on a shared principle: education is meant to humanise power, not legitimise it. It is in this moral and constitutional context that the New Education Bill must be examined, and it falls short on both counts.
Constitutional Retreat on Access and Equity
From the standpoint of Supreme Court jurisprudence, the Bill represents not merely a policy shift but a constitutional retreat. The Court has consistently held that education is implicit in the right to life under Article 21. In Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka (1992), it affirmed that access to education is integral to dignity and cannot be denied on grounds of economic incapacity. This principle was further refined in Unni Krishnan v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993), which clarified that while private participation may exist, the primary obligation to ensure access, affordability, and equity rests with the state.
The New Education Bill reverses this constitutional logic. Instead of correcting decades of underinvestment, it normalises scarcity. Public institutions are nudged towards self-financing, autonomy is offered without assured public funding, and private or philanthropic actors are positioned as structural substitutes for the state. Scarcity is no longer treated as a governance failure but as an operational premise, shifting costs onto students through higher fees, shrinking subsidies, and expanding reliance on loans.
This has direct implications for equality. The Court has repeatedly held that formal equality is insufficient in education, which demands substantive state intervention to correct historical disadvantage. Articles 14, 15(4), and 46 impose positive obligations on the state. Yet autonomy without funding becomes a euphemism for market dependence, hollowing out the constitutional promise of equal opportunity.
In T.M.A. Pai Foundation (2002) and P.A. Inamdar (2005), the Court allowed private participation but placed firm limits: education could not become profiteering, nor could access depend solely on purchasing power. The New Education Bill strains these limits. As education analyst RavikantKisana has warned, students are quietly recast as consumers and education as a purchasable service. Loans expand, scholarships recede, and debt replaces entitlement, reshaping not merely education but citizenship itself.
Centralisation and Erosion of Academic Freedom
Equally troubling is the Bill’s centralising architecture. Though education lies in the Concurrent List, constitutional practice has recognised the central role of states in shaping curricula responsive to linguistic, cultural, and regional realities. By concentrating curricular frameworks, accreditation, and evaluation in centrally designed bodies, the Bill reduces states to implementers rather than partners, weakening cooperative federalism and flattening India’s educational diversity.
This centralisation also threatens academic freedom under Article 19(1)(a). Universities have long been recognised as spaces of free inquiry, vital to democratic life. When curriculum design and evaluation are insulated from plural consultation and academic self-governance, education becomes vulnerable to ideological narrowing – not always through overt censorship, but through the quiet disciplining of inquiry.
Teachers, too, are constitutionally implicated. Contractualisation, performance surveillance, and administrative insecurity erode academic freedom at its roots. An education system that governs teachers through fear cannot nurture students.
The New Education Bill’s deepest flaw is therefore philosophical. It does not ask how education can deepen democracy, reduce inequality, or cultivate scientific temper as mandated by Article 51A(h). Instead, it frames education as an instrument for producing a globally competitive workforce within centrally manageable parameters, mistaking order for progress and efficiency for justice.
MGNREGA: A Rights-Based Democratic Intervention
Enacted in 2005, MGNREGA was not merely an employment programme; it was a constitutional experiment in democratic empowerment. Born from grassroots struggles and judicial interpretations of the right to life, it guaranteed work on demand, placed planning authority with Gram Sabhas, and made the state legally accountable for failure.
Its achievements were both measurable and moral. Millions accessed wage security; women constituted over half the workforce; rural assets strengthened ecological resilience. Most crucially, power flowed upwards, from village to state, rather than downwards from Delhi. Poverty was recognised not as individual failure but as structural injustice.
VB-G RAM G Act: From Right to Work to Managed Labour
Projected as MGNREGA’s modern successor, the VB-G RAM G Act represents a decisive departure from the rights-based framework that once anchored rural employment within the constitutional promise of dignity under Article 21. While the Act promises expanded employment days and climate-linked works, these gains are offset by structural regressions that fundamentally alter the nature of the guarantee itself.
Seasonal pauses of up to 60 days effectively suspend the right to work during periods of peak distress, transforming an enforceable entitlement into a conditional provision. Demand-driven guarantees are replaced by budget-capped allocations, while the 60:40 Centre-State funding model shifts fiscal burden onto states already under stress, deepening regional inequalities and eroding the federal balance.
Technology, introduced without adequate safeguards, compounds exclusion. For women, Adivasis, elderly workers, and persons with disabilities, digital systems intended to enhance efficiency often function as barriers, layering technological denial upon historical marginalisation. Access becomes contingent not on need, but on administrative compliance.
The cumulative effect is a subtle yet profound shift in the state’s obligation – from guaranteeing work as a matter of right to managing labour within predefined limits of fiscal and bureaucratic convenience. What was once an assertion of citizenship increasingly resembles administrative discretion, recasting the rural poor not as rights-bearing workers but as managed participants in a centrally controlled system.
Centralisation Across Sectors: A Pattern, Not an Exception
This logic of centralisation and managerial control extends well beyond employment and education. The SabkaBimaSabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Bill, 2025, while presented as a move towards universal insurance coverage, subtly reconfigures social protection by weakening public responsibility. Risk that was earlier pooled through state-backed guarantees is increasingly individualised, mediated through private insurers and market instruments. Access expands in form, but accountability thins in substance. Citizens are no longer rights-bearing beneficiaries of social security but customers navigating contractual obligations, exclusions, and actuarial logic, where failure is personalised and systemic inequities are rendered invisible.
A similar shift is evident in the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill, 2025. Framed as a necessity for energy security and climate transition, the Bill concentrates nuclear governance within the executive, marginalising state governments, local communities, and independent regulatory oversight. Federal consultation, environmental scrutiny, and public deliberation are treated as procedural hurdles rather than democratic necessities. Decisions with long-term ecological safety, and intergenerational consequences are thus insulated from political accountability in the name of technocratic efficiency.
Across sectors, a common grammar emerges. Rights are reframed as services to be delivered, participation as procedural compliance, and accountability as internal regulation rather than public answerability. The citizen is repositioned, not as a democratic claimant shaping policybut as a managed subject within centrally designed systems, expected to adapt rather than contest.
Socio-Economic Consequences in a ‘Viksit’ India
In the short term, reduced employment access accelerates migration, indebtedness, and rural distress. In the long run, rural economies hollow out, climate vulnerability deepens, and social unrest simmers beneath official growth narratives. As economist Jean Drèze has long cautioned: efficiency without rights merely redistributes risk downward.
Development that silences the poor is not progress; it is displacement.
Reclaiming Rights and Democracy
Reform is not the problem. Direction is. A genuinely democratic pathway would restore demand-driven funding, eliminate arbitrary pauses, strengthen Gram Sabhas, and treat technology as an aid, not a gatekeeper. It would expand public investment rather than outsource responsibility.
Civil society, trade unions, opposition parties, and constitutional courts must act as counterweights. Democracies survive not through policy perfection, but through resistance to concentration of power.
When Reform Rewrites the Republic
Taken together, the New Education Bill, the VB-G RAM G Act, the SabkaBimaSabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Bill, 2025, and the SHANTI Bill do not constitute isolated or sectoral reforms. They signal a deeper philosophical reorientation of the Indian state.
As B.R. Ambedkar warned, political democracy cannot survive without social and economic democracy. Education must cultivate critical citizens, not compliant workers; employment must secure dignity, not merely manage distress; social protection must pool risk collectively, not individualise failure. A Constitution committed to justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity demands no less.
The question before India, therefore, is no longer whether it will become ‘Viksit’ (Developed), but whom it will develop for, and at what constitutional cost.