Education in India, 2025: When Adjudication Replaced Authority
By our team of in-house writers.
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First publised on 2025-12-28 04:33:59
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By our team of in-house writers.
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Education governance in India during 2025 was defined less by reform than by adjudication. Schools and universities functioned, examinations were conducted, and enrolments expanded. Yet institutional authority weakened steadily as disputes over testing, appointments, regulation and university governance migrated from ministries and regulators to courtrooms. What the year exposed was not a collapse of education delivery, but the erosion of administrative finality.
By the close of 2025, it was increasingly the judiciary - rather than education authorities - that supplied closure in matters that should have been resolved by policy and process.
Examinations and the Supreme Court's Shadow
The most consequential imprint on education governance in 2025 came from the Supreme Court's continuing supervision of centrally conducted examinations, particularly those administered by the National Testing Agency. While the immediate controversies surrounding NEET-UG erupted in 2024, their institutional consequences dominated the following year.
The Court cancelled the award of grace marks, examined allegations of irregularities, declined to order a nationwide re-test, but placed the NTA under sustained judicial watch. It sought affidavits, directed corrective measures, and made it explicit that examination credibility could not rest solely on administrative assurances. What mattered was the precedent: examination bodies no longer enjoyed unquestioned authority to conclusively close their own processes.
Litigation became an expected stage of the examination cycle. Candidates increasingly treated courts as the final guarantor of fairness, not regulators.
CUET, Normalisation, and the Limits of Centralisation
The same pattern surfaced with CUET and other centralised tests. Petitions before high courts and the Supreme Court challenged eligibility criteria, normalisation methods and result delays. Judicial emphasis on transparency and proportionality filled a vacuum left by opaque and inconsistent administrative practices.
Centralisation expanded faster than grievance-redressal capacity. In 2025, courts increasingly provided what regulators could not: closure.
Coaching, Kota, and Court-Enforced Minimum Governance
The coaching ecosystem again drew judicial attention in 2025, particularly after student deaths in Kota and other exam hubs. High courts sought explanations from state authorities on safety norms, counselling access and regulatory enforcement.
Courts did not regulate pedagogy or outcomes. They compelled minimum governance - fire safety, basic welfare standards, administrative oversight - functions education departments had long neglected. Coaching remained structurally dominant; regulation remained episodic and prodded by the judicially.
Universities, Autonomy, and the Governor-Chancellor Dispute
University governance in 2025 was unsettled by an escalating constitutional conflict over the role of governors as chancellors of state universities, with Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal emerging as principal battlegrounds.
State governments moved to curtail or remove the governor's role, accusing Raj Bhavans of delaying vice-chancellor appointments and paralysing administration. Governors countered by withholding assent or questioning legislative competence. In West Bengal, the confrontation was particularly acute, with several universities operating under interim arrangements amid open conflict between the state government and Raj Bhavan.
The Supreme Court intervened to underline limits on gubernatorial discretion - particularly the inability to indefinitely sit on bills - while stopping short of endorsing direct executive control of universities. The result was judicially managed ambiguity. Universities remained suspended between constitutional authority and political power, with autonomy invoked by all sides and secured by none.
NEP and UGC: Reform Without Consequence
Five years after its promulgation, the National Education Policy 2020 remained a document of aspiration rather than institutional transformation. The multidisciplinary framework, multiple entry-exit pathways, and promised autonomy for higher education institutions existed more in curricular announcements than in practice. The Higher Education Commission of India, intended to replace the UGC as a lighter-touch, empowering regulator, remained unformed.
The UGC itself continued as a licensing authority rather than a capacity-builder, its regulatory interventions generating compliance rituals but little substantive change. What was striking about 2025 was not that NEP implementation faced obstacles - all ambitious reforms do - but that it remained largely peripheral to the governance battles that defined the year. The disputes over examinations, recruitment, and university chancellorships unfolded as though NEP had not reimagined education governance at all. Courts intervened to enforce basic procedural fairness; NEP promised transformed institutions.
The distance between the two defined the gap between policy ambition and institutional reality. The paradox was complete: India's most comprehensive education reform in decades coexisted with governance so brittle that administrative authority migrated to courtrooms. NEP's vision of empowered, autonomous institutions collided with a system where universities operated under interim arrangements, recruitment required judicial supervision, and examination credibility depended on court-mandated corrective measures. The reform existed; the system it sought to reform remained structurally unchanged.
WB's Teacher Recruitment Crisis: Judiciary Intervenes
No education issue in 2025 illustrated governance failure more starkly than West Bengal's school teacher recruitment crisis and its judicial trajectory. What began as large-scale irregularities in appointments made through the School Service Commission escalated into a prolonged institutional breakdown.
In a controversial move, the Calcutta High Court ordered the dismissal of all teachers appointed through the tainted recruitment process, treating the selection exercise as irredeemably compromised. The order triggered immediate concern over proportionality, given the presence of candidates whose appointments were not individually proven to be illegal.
In 2025, the Supreme Court intervened to quash the High Court's blanket dismissal order, holding that mass termination without individual scrutiny could not be sustained in law. While reaffirming that illegal appointments must be undone and accountability enforced, the Court drew a clear line between targeted correction and indiscriminate punishment.
At the same time, the Court continued to supervise the clean-up of the recruitment process, including verification, cancellation of tainted appointments, and protection of legitimately selected candidates. The fallout remained severe: schools faced staff shortages, thousands of teachers remained in limbo, and recruitment effectively stalled under judicial oversight.
What made the Bengal episode exceptional was not merely corruption, but executive collapse followed by corrective overreach. Recruitment, verification and remediation - core administrative functions - were effectively conducted under court supervision. The judiciary was compelled not only to correct illegality, but to restrain administrative excess in the name of correction.
Discipline, Due Process, and Campus Litigation
Across states, public universities continued to face court scrutiny over disciplinary action against students and faculty. High courts intervened in suspensions, rustications, fee hikes and hostel exclusions, often on procedural grounds.
Institutions lost authority not because courts second-guessed academic judgment, but because internal processes repeatedly failed basic standards of fairness, proportionality and reasoned decision-making.
Teachers, Appointments, and Service Disputes
Beyond Bengal, teacher recruitment and service conditions generated sustained litigation across the country. Delayed appointments, contractual extensions, transfers and promotions reached courts in multiple states. In higher education, continued reliance on ad-hoc faculty led to repeated judicial directions on regularisation and timelines.Courts did not design policy; they enforced administrative consistency where executive action faltered.
Learning Outcomes: What ASER Revealed
If courts defined governance in 2025, ASER defined outcomes. The Annual Status of Education Report painted a sobering picture of foundational learning, particularly in government schools. In 2024, 76.6% of Class III students could not read a Class II-level text, despite modest improvements from pandemic lows. Among Class V students, only 30.7% could solve basic division problems - leaving nearly 70% unable to perform arithmetic appropriate for their grade. Enrollment and attendance recovered after the pandemic; learning did not. The paradox deepened: nearly 90% of 14-16-year-olds now had smartphone access, yet only 57% used them for educational purposes. Technology expanded reach, not pedagogy. Government schools, meanwhile, saw their enrollment share decline from 72.9% in 2022 to 66.8% in 2024, intensifying pressure on already stretched teaching capacity. ASER quietly underscored the cost of governance drift: children progressing through grades without acquiring grade-appropriate competencies.
The Verdict of 2025
By the end of 2025, India's education system had not collapsed. But it had lost decisiveness. Examinations were conducted, but legitimacy was judicially certified. Teacher recruitment in at least one major state collapsed into court supervision. University governance was constitutionally contested rather than administratively resolved. Learning outcomes lagged far behind enrolment and infrastructure gains.
The judiciary did not seek to become an education regulator. It was pushed into that role by executive retreat, regulatory weakness and political conflict. ASER, meanwhile, quietly underscored the cost of this drift: children progressing without learning.
The lesson of 2025 is not that education reform failed, but that governance failed to align authority with accountability. Without restoring credibility to examinations, integrity to recruitment, autonomy to institutions and capacity to classrooms, the system risks becoming procedurally intense but educationally shallow.
That is the education burden India carries forward from 2025.
