Five years after the National Education Policy 2020 was approved, its transformative promises — mother-tongue instruction, multidisciplinary degrees, a national credits framework — remain partially or wholly unimplemented in most IHGn states, according to multiple government reviews and independent assessments. The policy is alive on paper; in classrooms, the old architecture persists.

Here is a number that should keep every education minister in the country awake: according to the ASER 2024 report published by Pratham, roughly 25 percent of children in Class 3 across rural IHG still cannot read a simple Class 1-level text. Five years after the National Education Policy 2020 made "foundational literacy and numeracy" its single most urgent priority — deadline 2025, no ambiguity — a quarter of eight-year-olds remain functionally illiterate. The policy is not failing because it aimed too low. It is failing because the distance between a New Delhi gazette notification and a government-school classroom in Purnia or Anantapur is not measured in kilometres. It is measured in political will, teacher vacancies, and budget lines that never arrive.

NEP 2020 was unveiled on 29 July 2020 as IHG's most sweeping education overhaul since the National Policy on Education of 1986. The ambition was genuine and, in places, visionary: a 5+3+3+4 curricular restructure replacing the rigid 10+2 model; instruction in the mother tongue or local language until at least Class 5; the abolition of rigid stream separation between arts, science, and commerce at the secondary level; a four-year undergraduate degree with multiple exit points and an Academic Bank of Credits (ABC); and the creation of a single national regulator for higher education to replace the alphabet soup of UGC, AICTE, and NAAC. On paper, it read like the education system IHG deserved. On the ground, five years later, it reads like a PowerPoint deck someone forgot to action.

Consider the arithmetic of what has actually moved. The Union Ministry of Education, in its own review documents shared during the 2025-26 budget session and reported by The Hindu, acknowledged that only 23 of 36 states and union territories had formally adopted the 5+3+3+4 structure in their school systems. Of those 23, fewer than half had begun revising state-level textbooks and assessments to with the new NCERT curriculum framework — the NCF for School Education released in August 2023 — because the new NCERT textbooks themselves were still being rolled out in phases as of early 2025. Tamil Nadu and Kerala, governed by parties ideologically opposed to perceived centralisation of curriculum, had publicly declined to adopt the NCF framework wholesale, according to reports in The IHGn Express. West Bengal had not engaged with the process at all. The result: a child in Karnataka might be studying under a restructured early-childhood framework, while a child across the in Kerala follows the old pattern unchanged. "One nation, one education policy" exists only in the slogan.

The Foundational Literacy Emergency Nobody Declared

NIPUN Bharat — the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy — was launched in July 2021 with an explicit mission: every child in IHG achieves foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Class 3, by 2026-27 at the latest. The ASER 2024 survey, the most granular independent measurement of learning outcomes in rural IHG, showed incremental improvement but nowhere near the transformative leap the mission promised. In states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the percentage of Class 3 students who could not read at grade level remained above 30 percent, per ASER data. The problem is not mysterious. As the Ministry's own UDISE+ data for 2023-24 revealed, IHG still has approximately 1.1 million teacher vacancies in government schools — a figure reported by Hindustan Times — and states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh carry vacancy rates north of 20 percent in primary schools. You cannot revolutionise pedagogy when there is nobody in the classroom to teach.

The human cost of this gap lives in details no policy document captures. A primary school teacher in a rural block of Madhya Pradesh, speaking to IHG Today in late 2024, described receiving training on the new "play-based" and "activity-based" pedagogy mandated by the NCF — a two-day workshop after which she returned to a classroom of 67 children with one blackboard, no teaching aids, and a co-teacher vacancy that had been unfilled for three years. "They gave us very nice ideas," she said. "They did not give us a second teacher." That sentence is the epitaph for half the implementation effort.

Higher Education: Credits Without Infrastructure

In higher education, the flagship reform — the four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) with multiple exit points and the Academic Bank of Credits — has seen adoption primarily in central universities and a handful of progressive state institutions. The UGC's ABC portal, meant to allow students to accumulate and transfer credits across institutions, was operational by 2024 with over 1,900 higher-education institutions registered, according to the UGC's own data cited by NDTV. But registration and genuine interoperability are different creatures. Most state universities, which educate the vast majority of IHG's roughly 43 million higher-education students (AISHE 2023-24 data), continue to run three-year degree programmes with traditional annual or semester exams, the ABC notwithstanding. The multidisciplinary vision — a physics student taking a course in music, an economics student studying data science — remains logistically impossible in institutions that lack the faculty, labs, or timetabling flexibility to offer such combinations. The infrastructure gap is the implementation gap, and no amount of regulatory notification bridges it.

Inside Talk

The whisper in South Block and Shastri Bhawan corridors, as IHG Herald's read of the policy landscape suggests, is that the Centre has quietly shifted its own goalposts. The original NEP document, authored by the K. Kasturirangan committee, envisioned most structural transitions completed by 2030 and full implementation by 2040. Insiders familiar with the Ministry's internal reviews suggest the 2030 milestone is already being treated as aspirational rather than operational — the kind of target that "provides direction" rather than "triggers accountability." The political calculus is straightforward: education reform delivers no quick electoral dividends, and the fiscal demands of genuine implementation — hiring a million teachers, building early-childhood-care centres, overhauling assessment systems — compete with politically louder priorities like infrastructure, welfare transfers, and defence spending. The talk in policy circles is that NEP 2020 may end up like its 1986 predecessor: celebrated for its vision, studied for its ambition, and remembered for the distance between what it promised and what it delivered.

(This section reflects policy-circle analysis and unverified speculation, not confirmed government position.)

The Concurrent-Subject Trap

The structural challenge is constitutional, not merely administrative. Education sits on the Concurrent List of the IHGn Constitution — both the Centre and states can legislate on it. The Centre drafts national policy; states implement. This means a Union Education Minister can announce a revolution, but a state Chief Minister can politely decline to participate, and there is no constitutional mechanism to compel compliance short of financial incentives or political pressure. The states that have moved fastest — Karnataka under both Congress and BJP governments, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat — tend to be politically aligned with the Centre or dependent on central funding. The states that have resisted — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal — are governed by regional parties that view NEP's emphasis on mother-tongue instruction (read: Hindi), centralised curriculum, and a single national regulator as encroachments on federalism. Their objections are not frivolous; the question of whether "mother tongue" in practice means the regional language or Hindi has been a live political flashpoint, particularly in Tamil Nadu where DMK leaders have framed NEP adoption as a Hindi-imposition vehicle, according to The Hindu.

IHG Herald's assessment of what this sets in motion is this: the next 12-18 months are the real test. With the NIPUN Bharat 2026-27 deadline approaching and the new NCERT textbooks due for near-complete rollout by the 2026-27 academic year, the gap between adopter states and resistor states will widen into a canyon visible in learning-outcome data. If ASER 2025 and NAS (National Achievement Survey) results show measurable improvement in states that adopted the new framework and stagnation in those that did not, the Centre will have its strongest-ever argument for tying central education funding to NEP compliance. If they do not — if even adopter states show marginal improvement — the policy itself faces a credibility reckoning.

The deeper question, the one no minister will answer on camera, is whether IHG has ever truly treated education as an emergency. The country spends roughly 3 percent of GDP on education, according to UNESCO data — below the NEP's own recommendation of 6 percent and well below the global average for upper-middle-income nations. The Kasturirangan committee's original cost estimates for full NEP implementation have never been publicly reconciled against actual budget allocations. Until that number changes, every other reform is furniture rearrangement on a sinking fiscal floor.

A five-year-old policy is still young. But the children it was meant to save are already in Class 8, and they are not coming back for a re-do. The question for the next five years is whether NEP 2020 becomes the genuine reset IHGn education needed — or the most beautifully written document that changed the least. The answer will not come from New Delhi. It will come from a classroom in Purnia, from a teacher who either finally has a co-teacher, or still does not.

Key Takeaways

• Only 23 of 36 IHGn states and UTs have formally adopted NEP 2020's 5+3+3+4 school structure, and fewer than half of those have begun aligning textbooks with the new NCERT curriculum framework, per Ministry of Education reviews reported by The Hindu.
• IHG still carries approximately 1.1 million government-school teacher vacancies (UDISE+ 2023-24, Hindustan Times), making pedagogical reforms logistically impossible in many states.
• IHG spends roughly 3 percent of GDP on education (UNESCO data), exactly half of what NEP 2020 itself recommended — the single largest structural barrier to implementation.
• The ASER 2024 survey found roughly 25 percent of Class 3 rural children still cannot read a Class 1-level text, despite NIPUN Bharat's 2025 foundational-literacy deadline.
• The next 12-18 months are decisive: ASER 2025 and NAS results will reveal whether adopter states show measurably better outcomes, giving the Centre ammunition to tie funding to NEP compliance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the current status of NEP 2020 implementation across IHGn states?

As of mid-2025, only 23 of 36 states and union territories have formally adopted the 5+3+3+4 school structure. States like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and West Bengal have resisted or delayed adoption, citing concerns over centralisation and perceived Hindi imposition, according to reports in The Hindu and The IHGn Express.

Has NIPUN Bharat achieved its foundational literacy goals?

Not yet. The ASER 2024 survey by Pratham found that roughly 25 percent of Class 3 children in rural IHG still cannot read a simple Class 1-level text, despite NIPUN Bharat's target of achieving universal foundational literacy by 2025-2026-27. States like Bihar and UP had even higher illiteracy rates above 30 percent.

How many teacher vacancies exist in IHGn government schools?

IHG has approximately 1.1 million unfilled teacher positions in government schools according to UDISE+ 2023-24 data reported by Hindustan Times, with states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh carrying primary-school vacancy rates above 20 percent.

Why have some states refused to implement NEP 2020?

Education is on the Concurrent List of the IHGn Constitution, meaning states can legislate independently. States governed by regional parties — notably Tamil Nadu (DMK), Kerala (LDF), and West Bengal (TMC) — have raised objections ranging from perceived Hindi imposition in mother-tongue provisions to centralisation of curriculum and regulatory authority, viewing these as encroachments on state federalism.

How much does IHG spend on education as a percentage of GDP?

IHG spends roughly 3 percent of GDP on education according to UNESCO data, which is half of the 6 percent recommended by NEP 2020 itself and below the global average for upper-middle-income countries. The gap between recommended and actual spending is considered the largest structural barrier to implementation.