Six Years of NEP 2020: Are We Changing Classrooms or Just Conversations?

On 29 July 2020, the government approved the National Education Policy, or NEP. India had not changed its education policy for 34 years before this. On the same day, the Ministry of Human Resource Development was renamed the Ministry of Education.

Six years have passed. So what has really changed?

Something has changed. That is the honest answer. But the change is not the same everywhere. And in some places, it has not reached the classroom at all.

This week many newspapers will say NEP is a big success. Others will say it has failed. This article is not for that debate. It is for the people who have to actually do the work — principals, coordinators and teachers.

For you, the question is simple. Has NEP reached your classroom? Or has it only reached your notice board?

Part 1: What has really happened

Let us be fair first. A lot of real work has been done in six years.

The school structure has changed in most states. About 32 states and union territories now follow the 5+3+3+4 system. Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have not. They still follow the old 10+2 system.

Why can they refuse? Because education is a shared subject. Both the Centre and the states have power over it. So no state can be forced.

The biggest fight is about language — the three-language formula and teaching in the mother tongue.

Also remember: the target for full rollout across India is 2040, not 2026.

New textbooks are finally coming. The NCF-SE is the document that decides what goes inside textbooks. It came out in August 2023.

In March 2026, NCERT announced the plan:

• Class 9 gets fully new books in 2026-27. The new English book is called Kaveri. It replaces Beehive and Moments.
• Class 10 and Class 11 books will come only in 2027-28.

Board exams are changing. CBSE has confirmed two board exams a year for Class 10, starting 2026-27.

• The February exam is compulsory.
• The May exam is optional.
• If a student writes both, the better marks are kept.

CISCE is planning to do the same. For most secondary schools, this is the biggest change coming next year.

A national assessment system now exists. PARAKH is the national body for assessment. Its 2024 survey covered about 21 lakh students and 2.7 lakh teachers.

It has also released a digital Holistic Progress Card, so schools do not have to fill it by hand.

Teacher training has reached a big number. More than 25 lakh teachers have completed NISHTHA training for foundational learning.

A new four-year teacher education course (ITEP) started in 2024-25 in 57 universities.

There was always a plan. SARTHAQ listed every task, with names and dates, right from the beginning.

So the plan was never missing. Something else went wrong.

Part 2: Where the problem is

Look carefully at the list above and you will see a pattern.

NEP has moved fast where Delhi could do the work directly. Training videos, frameworks, apps, new textbooks — all of this can be made in one office and sent out.

NEP has moved slowly where the work depends on 14.7 lakh schools. Hiring teachers. Stopping children from dropping out. Changing how a teacher teaches on a normal Tuesday morning. No office can do this for you.

This creates three big gaps.

Gap 1: Teachers are not trained to make new-type question papers

Two board exams a year is not just a date change. It changes everything:

• Syllabus must finish earlier
• Revision time becomes shorter
• Weak students who come back in May need extra classes
• Teachers must guide students on whether to write the second exam

Most schools have changed the calendar. Very few have changed the teaching.

And the real change NEP wants is deeper. It wants questions that test understanding, not memory. This is the heart of NEP’s assessment reforms.

No circular can do this. A teacher must be able to write such a question, not only give a paper that came from outside.

Ask yourself: last year, how many outcome-based question papers did your own teachers make? And how many were simply downloaded?

Gap 2: Too much paperwork, too little time

The Holistic Progress Card, or HPC, is the best example of this problem.

A proper HPC covers everything — marks, behaviour, feelings, creativity, what the child says about himself, what classmates say. It is the report card for holistic education.

Now do the maths.

• One HPC by hand takes about 20 minutes
• A school with 1,000 students needs more than 300 hours

When a reform eats up a teacher’s free period, it does not get used properly. It gets completed somehow.

The cards get filled one week before the deadline. Same lines are copied for every child. And the useful information never reaches the next year’s teacher.

This is how a good idea slowly becomes just paperwork. It can be stopped — but only if the school treats HPC as a time and process problem, not a file-submission problem.

Gap 3: Many schools still do not have the basics

Modern teaching needs some minimum facilities. Many schools still do not have them.

UDISE+ data for 2025-26 shows:

• About 70% of schools have computers
• About 67% have internet

This is much better than 2020. But it also means almost 1 in 3 schools had no internet.

So before we talk about smart classrooms or AI-based learning, we must remember this number.

Teacher shortage is a bigger worry:

• Around 10 lakh teacher posts are empty across India
• Bihar and Uttar Pradesh each have more than 2 lakh empty posts
• Kerala and Tamil Nadu are in better shape, with about 30 students per teacher

So the same policy feels very different in different states.

And behind all of this is money. NEP said India should spend 6% of GDP on education. This target was first given in 1966. It has never been reached even once. Today the spending is about 3.2%.

Most problems schools face come back to this one line.

Part 3: Two promises that are still far away

1. Reading and maths in early classes

NEP said something very clear and very strong. Every child must learn basic reading and maths — called FLN — by 2025. NEP even said that if this does not happen, the rest of the policy will not matter for most children.

That 2025 date is over.

The NIPUN Bharat target is now 2026-27 — next year. Every Class 3 child should be able to read and understand.

Teaching in government primary classes has really improved. That is true. But doing this for 24.7 crore children, after so much Covid learning loss, was always going to be very hard.

One point almost nobody talks about: NIPUN Bharat has mostly reached government schools. Private schools have not got the same push. Nearly one-third of India’s children study in private schools.

So if you run a private school, fixing FLN is your job. And it must start in the early and preparatory classes, not in Class 3.

2. Students leaving school after Class 10

The numbers are worrying:

• Only about 45% of students stay till the end of higher secondary
• Dropout at secondary level is still in double digits
• Only about 56% of the right age group is enrolled in higher secondary

The end of the no-detention policy after Class 5 and Class 8 has made this problem more visible. It has not solved it.

No textbook can fix this. Children leave school for money reasons and family reasons. This is the part NEP can do least about from Delhi.

Part 4: But is six years too early to judge?

This is a fair question. And the answer is partly yes.

• Back in 2020, state committees already said the deadlines were too fast
• NEP itself says full rollout will take till 2040
• In other big countries, such reforms took ten years or more to show results
• Some parts are stuck for legal reasons, not classroom reasons. For example, the Higher Education Commission of India was never created because the Bill lapsed

So the correct thing to say is not “NEP has failed.”

The correct thing to say is this: after six years, “we are still in transition” .

Part 5: Check your own school in 10 minutes

You do not need a big report to know where your school stands. Just ask these seven questions in your next staff meeting.

1. Question papers Can you show three question papers from last term that your own teachers wrote to test understanding?

2. Board exam plan Do you have a written plan for the February and May Class 10 exams? Including what happens to students in between?

3. HPC time How many minutes does one Holistic Progress Card take in your school? If nobody knows the answer, that itself is the answer.

4. FLN data Do you have reading and maths data for each child in Classes 1 to 3? Or only exam marks?

5. After training Your teachers finished NISHTHA training. How many actually changed something in the classroom after that?

6. New books Class 9 gets completely new NCERT books in 2026-27. Has your Class 9 team read them yet?

7. Activities on the timetable Are 10 bagless days, toy-based teaching and mother-tongue teaching actually on your timetable? Or only in your school brochure?

If many answers are uncomfortable, do not feel bad. Your school did not fail.

This is what happens when a very big policy is given to schools without extra time, extra teachers or extra money.

But it is still better to know where you stand — before someone else checks it for you.

The real question after six years

NEP 2020 gave India something it did not have for 30 years: a clear direction.

Six years have given us new structures, new apps, new frameworks and a new way of talking about school.

What we do not have yet, in every school, is a different Tuesday morning in the classroom.

The easy part is over. Now the doing matters more than the planning.

And the real gap is no longer between the Centre and the states. It is between schools that changed their teaching — and schools that only changed their files.

The question for year seven is not whether NEP works. It is whether your school can show its work.

If you are planning ahead, the roadmap to 2030 is more useful to keep open than the policy document itself.

Published on July 30, 2026