Six Years Of NEP 2020: The Gap Between Policy Design And Classroom Reality

Policy Update
Manvik

Background

In July 2020, the Union Cabinet approved the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, replacing a framework that had stood for 34 years. It promised a complete overhaul: a new 5+3+3+4 curricular structure, mother tongue instruction in early grades, a 100% Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) target by 2030, multidisciplinary universities, a flexible credit system, and a shift away from rote learning toward competency-based education. The policy was built on the recommendations of the Dr. K. Kasturirangan Committee and was positioned as the document that would carry Indian education from the twentieth century into the twenty-first (Ministry of Education, 2020; Vaishnav, 2025).

Six years is a long enough period to move past the question of whether NEP is well designed and ask a more difficult one: how much of it has actually reached the classroom. Government data itself suggests the answer is more complicated than official progress reports tend to acknowledge.

Functioning

On paper, the institutional architecture is largely in place.

The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023 has been notified by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), reshaping textbooks and pedagogy around competency based learning rather than content coverage (NCERT, 2023). The National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement (NISHTHA), the Ministry of Education’s flagship in-service teacher training programme under NEP 2020, is designed to build teacher capacity in areas such as foundational literacy and numeracy, competency based learning, inclusive education, and the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in classrooms.

As of 2025, NISHTHA has trained over 4 lakh teachers and school heads, delivered largely through the Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) platform and the PM e-Vidya initiative, both of which host multilingual e-content, teacher training modules, and virtual labs accessible via app, television, and radio to reach schools with limited internet connectivity (Ministry of Education, 2025; PIB, 2020). The National Mission on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, branded NIPUN Bharat (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy), had by mid-2025 reached over 4.2 crore students across 8.9 lakh schools (Ministry of Education, 2025).

PM SHRI (Pradhan Mantri Schools for Rising India) schools are meant to function as exemplar institutions demonstrating NEP implementation. PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), the national assessment body under NCERT, has been tasked with standardising how learning outcomes are measured across school boards, and conducted its first large-scale national achievement survey, PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan, in December 2024, covering over 22.9 lakh students across 75,565 schools in Grades 3, 6, and 9 (PARAKH, 2024).

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET), introduced in 2022, has become the dominant gateway into undergraduate admissions, replacing dozens of separate university-level entrance exams. The Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) allows students to accumulate and transfer academic credits across institutions, at least in principle.

The institutional machinery, in other words, has been substantially built out. Whether it functions with the intended reach and consistency at the classroom level is a separate and considerably more difficult question, and one that the enrolment, retention, and infrastructure data examined below is better placed to answer than any list of schemes.

Performance

UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education Plus), the Ministry of Education’s own school data system, presents a more complicated picture than official scheme-wise updates typically convey (Ministry of Education, UDISE+ Dashboard, n.d.).

Enrolment has declined, not grown. Total enrolment across all levels fell from 25.38 crore in 2020-21 to 23.29 crore in 2024-25, a drop of roughly 2.09 crore students (Education For All in India, 2025). Part of this decline reflects a genuine data cleanup, since the shift to student-level (Aadhaar-linked) tracking from 2022-23 onward removed duplicate and ghost entries that had inflated earlier counts. Even accounting for this, the enrollment base recorded today is smaller than it was when NEP was launched.

Secondary education, the policy’s stated priority, is stagnant.

Table 1: Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) by School Stage, 2020-21 vs. 2024-25

Source: UDISE+ data, as compiled and analysed in Education For All in India (2025).

The NEP target is 100% GER at secondary level by 2030. At the current pace, the remaining gap of roughly 21 percentage points would require an annual increase of about 3.5 points a year for five consecutive years. Nothing in the trend over the last five years suggests that pace is realistic; if anything, the secondary GER line is close to flat, and has moved backward, not forward.

Net Enrolment Ratio (NER) tells a starker story. NER excludes over-age and under-age children to show what share of the correct age cohort is actually sitting in the correct grade. At secondary level, NER was 52.5% in 2020-21 and stands at only 47.5% in 2024-25. In plain terms, fewer than half of India’s secondary-school-age children are enrolled in the grade appropriate to their age. At higher secondary, NER is just 35.8%, meaning roughly two out of every three eligible teenagers are not in a higher secondary classroom at the correct age (Education For All in India, 2025).

Dropout remains the central bottleneck. Dropout at secondary level stood at 14.6% in 2020-21 and, after fluctuating, sits at 11.5% in 2024-25. Retention from Class 1 to Class 10 is 62.9%. Of every 100 children who enter Class 1, only about 63 reach Class 10 without dropping out, and only 47 reach Class 12.

Figure 1: Student Retention Funnel, Class 1 to Class 12

Class 1 entry        : 100 students

Reach Class 10        : 63 students

Reach Class 12        : 47 students

Source: Derived from UDISE+ retention data, Education For All in India (2025).

Infrastructure has improved; digital access has lagged behind. Electricity now reaches 93.6% of schools, drinking water 99.3%, and functional toilets 98.6%, which represent genuine gains over the last decade (UDISE+ Dashboard, n.d.). However, only about 64.7% of schools have computers and 63.5% have internet connectivity as per UDISE+ 2024-25 data. For a policy that leans heavily on DIKSHA, PM e-Vidya, and AI-assisted learning tools such as e-Jaadui Pitara, this is a material constraint. A digital classroom strategy cannot outrun the physical digital infrastructure it depends on.

Teacher shortages persist despite favourable ratios. Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTR) are within the NEP’s benchmark of 30:1 at the aggregate level, ranging from roughly 15:1 at secondary to 23:1 at higher secondary. However, an estimated 10 lakh sanctioned teaching posts remain vacant nationally, concentrated at the elementary level and disproportionately in lower-income states (PRS Legislative Research, 2025). A favourable national PTR average does not guarantee that every classroom has a qualified, present teacher.

The out-of-school population is larger than school-based data alone shows. NSSO (National Sample Survey Office) 2025 survey data estimates that 16.8% of children aged 6 to 17, or roughly 47.4 million children, are out of school entirely. Because UDISE+ is a school-based system, it structurally undercounts these children, since it only captures those who have enrolled somewhere. Cross-referencing UDISE+ and NSSO data consistently points to states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh as carrying the heaviest combined burden of dropout and non-enrolment.

Impact

NEP 2020’s impact over six years is uneven across its stated priorities, and is best assessed separately by area.

Foundational learning. NIPUN Bharat has genuine reach at scale, having touched over 4.2 crore students, and represents one of the more operationally successful components of the policy (Ministry of Education, 2025). Early independent assessments of foundational literacy, while limited, suggest measurable movement, though comprehensive third-party evaluation is still emerging.

Assessment reform. PARAKH’s first national survey in December 2024 marks a meaningful step toward standardised, competency-based assessment across a country where board examinations have historically varied widely in rigour and format (PARAKH, 2024). Its long-term value depends on whether its findings translate into actual curriculum and teaching adjustments at the state level, which is not yet established.

Higher education entry. CUET has simplified what was previously a fragmented landscape of separate university entrance exams, and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education’s 2023 report on NEP implementation in higher education noted this as a genuine simplification, while also flagging that 70% of India’s universities still operate under State Acts, meaning central reforms cannot be uniformly imposed (Drishti IAS, 2023).

Inclusion-focused outcomes. Government data shows over 1.15 lakh students from socially and economically disadvantaged groups and 7.58 lakh girls have been brought into residential schooling schemes tied to NEP’s equity provisions (Ministry of Education, 2025). This is a concrete, countable gain, even if it addresses only a fraction of the estimated 47.4 million out-of-school children nationally.

Where impact is thin. The policy’s headline commitment, a 100% secondary GER by 2030, is on a trajectory that would require an implausible acceleration in the remaining years to meet. Secondary and higher secondary remain the weakest points in the entire K-12 chain, precisely where NEP claimed it would make the greatest difference.

The GER-NER gap, 22.4 percentage points nationally at the secondary level in 2023-24, indicates that even where children are technically enrolled, a large share are not in the age-appropriate grade, typically a sign of repeated grade retention or delayed school entry (Education For All in India, 2025). Research reviewing NEP’s structural transformations more broadly has also flagged that vocational education, despite being central to the policy’s employability goals, remains poorly integrated with mainstream academic tracks, limiting the real-world employability gains the policy promised (R Discovery, 2025).

Taken together, NEP’s impact so far is strongest in components that are centrally administered and digitally deliverable, such as teacher training modules and national assessments, and weakest in outcomes that depend on sustained state-level execution and household-level decisions, such as keeping a teenager enrolled through Class 12.

Emerging Issues

Federal friction. States such as Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have opposed the three-language formula and mother tongue instruction requirements, arguing these infringe on state authority, since education sits on the Concurrent List (PRS Legislative Research, 2025; Wikipedia, 2025). This is not a minor administrative disagreement; it directly affects how uniformly curriculum reforms can be rolled out nationally.

Underfunding relative to ambition. NEP recommends public spending on education reach 6% of GDP. Actual spending has remained below that mark years after the policy’s launch. State-level spending also varies sharply: Delhi, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra allocated over 18% of their expenditure to education in 2020-21, while Telangana (7.4%), Andhra Pradesh (12.1%), and Punjab (12.3%) lagged well behind the state average (Vaishnav, 2025). Samagra Shiksha, the umbrella scheme funding much of the on-ground implementation, works with an allocation (Rs 37,010 crore in 2024-25) that must stretch across scholarships, infrastructure, teacher recruitment, and digital rollout simultaneously.

Delayed institutional reform. The Higher Education Commission of India, intended to replace the University Grants Commission (UGC), has faced repeated delays. The National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education has also been slow to materialise. When regulatory scaffolding lags, downstream implementation lacks a firm structure to build on.

Low research investment. The Kasturirangan Committee itself flagged that India’s investment in research and innovation stands at just 0.69% of GDP, compared to 2.8% in the United States, 4.2% in South Korea, and 4.3% in Israel (PRS Legislative Research, 2025). NEP’s proposed National Research Foundation is meant to address this gap, but its funding and operational scale remain limited relative to the target.

Weak monitoring and data comparability. Comparing UDISE+ data across years has become genuinely difficult, since the reference date changed from 30 September to 31 March, and the data collection methodology shifted in 2022-23. Researchers who work with this data regularly flag it as a comparability challenge. If the system meant to measure NEP’s success is itself inconsistent across years, that undermines the ability to course-correct in real time.

Implementation criticism. Several scholars and educationists have criticised the pace and manner of NEP’s rollout as hasty, with some describing it as a risk to equitable access, and its implementation has drawn protests in parts of the country, particularly around the language provisions (Wikipedia, 2025).

Way Forward

A few interventions stand out as genuinely actionable, based on what the data shows rather than what the policy aspires to.

First, secondary and higher secondary retention needs targeted intervention rather than general funding increases: mentorship support, vocational training linked to the National Skills Qualification Framework, and direct financial incentives for continuing past Class 10 are likely to do more than broad infrastructure spending at this stage.

Second, bridge programmes at the upper primary to secondary, and secondary to higher secondary transitions, could ease the points where the data shows the steepest drop-offs.

Third, state-specific targeting matters more than national averages suggest. Kerala and Tamil Nadu are near-universal in enrollment; Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are not. Treating this as a single national problem with a single national solution overlooks where the actual crisis is concentrated.

Fourth, closing the digital access gap should precede, not accompany, further expansion of AI-powered and digital learning tools.DIKSHA lesson has limited value in a school without a working computer or internet connection. According to the UDISE+ 2025–26 report, around 30.1% of schools in India still do not have computer access, while about 33.7% lack internet connectivity 

Fifth, UDISE+ should be integrated with household-level surveys such as NSSO on an ongoing basis, rather than as an occasional cross-check, so that out-of-school children are systematically counted rather than structurally invisible to the very system meant to track them.

NEP 2020 was never short on vision. Six years in, the honest reading of its own data is that classroom reality has not caught up with policy design, and the next four years will determine whether that gap closes or simply becomes the new normal.

Selected References and Important Links

Drishti IAS. (2023, September 27). National Education Policy 2020 in higher education. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/national-education-policy-2020-in-higher-education

Drishti IAS. (2025). 5 years of NEP 2020. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/5-years-of-nep-2020

Education For All in India. (2025). Goal of universal secondary education by 2030: Analysis of UDISE 2020-21 to 2024-25 data in the context of NEP 2020. https://educationforallinindia.com/goal-of-universal-secondary-education-by-2030-analysis-of-udise-2020-21-to-2024-25-data-in-the-context-of-nep-2020s/

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy 2020. Press Information Bureau. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (n.d.). UDISE+ Dashboard. https://dashboard.udiseplus.gov.in/

National Council of Educational Research and Training. (2023). National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023. https://www.ncert.nic.in/pdf/NCFSE-2023-August_2023.pdf

PARAKH (National Assessment Centre). (2024). PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024. NCERT. https://parakh.ncert.gov.in/prs

Press Information Bureau. (2020). Highlights of New Education Policy 2020. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1654058

PRS Legislative Research. (2025). Report summary: National Education Policy 2020. https://prsindia.org/policy/report-summaries/national-education-policy-2020

R Discovery. (2025). Five years of NEP 2020: A review of structural transformations in Indian education. https://discovery.researcher.life/article/five-years-of-nep-2020-a-review-of-structural-transformations-in-indian-education/

Vaishnav, A. (2025). The National Education Policy 2020: Recommendations and the current situation. PRS Legislative Research. https://prsindia.org/articles-by-prs-team/the-national-education-policy-2020-recommendations-and-the-current-situation

Wikipedia. (2025). National Education Policy 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Policy_2020

About the Contributor

Manvik Shah, a second-year B.Com student at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, with an active interest in public policy and political science. He is currently a Research Intern at IMPRI.

Acknowledgement 

The author sincerely thanks the reviewers and editorial team for their valuable comments, constructive suggestions, and guidance. Their feedback helped improve the clarity, structure, and analytical depth of this policy update.

Reviewers: Ameya Satam and Shreeya Dixit

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.

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