India must fix its own classrooms
Can India truly aspire to become a Vishwa Guru when it continues to grapple with teacher shortages, overcrowding and inadequate learning outcomes?
Every September 5, India honours Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan - philosopher, Oxford scholar, and the Republic’s first Vice-President and second President. When students proposed celebrating his birthday after he became President in 1962, he asked instead that the date be observed as Teachers’ Day, insisting teachers deserved to rank among the nation’s finest minds. It is a fitting origin story for a country that has long seen itself as a wellspring of learning for the world.
That reverence is not sentimental excess. Teachers do more than deliver a syllabus; they build the cognitive and moral scaffolding on which every other profession stands. The doctor who saves a life, the engineer who builds a bridge, the officer who frames policy - all once sat before a teacher who taught them to reason, question and persist. In a country of 1.4 billion, no institution shapes the future more directly than the classroom, nor any individual more than the teacher standing in it.
India’s claim to Vishwa Guru status - teacher to the world - rests on genuine civilisational memory. Nalanda and Takshashila once drew scholars from Persia to China; the guru-shishya tradition treated teaching as a sacred trust, not a fallback career.
Reviving that stature is now stated national ambition, invoked from foreign-policy platforms to soft-power strategy. Ground reality is more sobering. A Parliamentary Standing Committee last year counted close to ten lakh vacant teaching posts under the Centre’s Samagra Shiksha scheme - over seven lakh of them at the primary and elementary level. Vacancies for secondary and senior-secondary teachers, precisely where subject expertise matters most, nearly doubled within a single year.
Regulators have simultaneously derecognised scores of teacher-training colleges that had reduced the B.Ed degree to a paper formality. Even the good news carries a warning: the most recent ASER survey, in 2024, found barely a quarter of Class 3 government-school children could read a Class 2-level text - a real improvement on 2022, but still a low bar for an aspiring Vishwa Guru.
Add chronically underpaid contract teachers, overcrowded classrooms and patchy in-service training, and the gap between rhetoric and classroom is hard to ignore.
Vishwa Guru cannot be built on borrowed civilisational glory alone. It has to be built teacher by teacher - through fair pay, rigorous training, manageable classrooms, and recruitment drives that fill vacancies before ministries announce new schemes.
Teachers’ Day should not be a 24-hour ritual that gives way, on September 6, to indifference about who is actually at the blackboard. The country would do well to remember that the surest way to teach the world is to first take proper care of those who teach it at home.
