Implement educational reforms in honour of K. Kasturirangan

Let's democratize Indian education in tribute to the vision of an educationist we're all indebted to

- Anurag Behar is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.

Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan passed away on 25 April 2025. Countless have contributed to building India, and his name will be among the top. But even the faintest of allusions to any such thing would have had him divert credit to his team, mentors, friends and the circumstances. Anybody but himself. So, I have wondered what tribute to pay him.

I have found a solution. I am writing about a book that I gave him in October 2017 as we started work on what became the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020), whose committee he chaired. Let us go back 60 years.

The Kothari Commission report in 1966 presented India with our first comprehensive blueprint for educational transformation, adopted as the National Policy on Education in 1968. J.P. Naik, the commission's member secretary, was its chief architect. His 1979 book Education Commission and After offers an assessment of that critical first decade of implementation, a period that revealed both the extraordinary promise of systemic reform and the sobering realities that derailed it.

The Commission's vision was for a radical re-imagining of education as a great democratizing force. Its proposed Common School System was designed to dismantle the entrenched apartheid between elite private institutions and under-resourced government schools.