India’s first indigenously-aligned curriculum board rejects colonial pedagogy, foregrounding decolonial education amid global neoliberal reforms
Original framing: “Bhartiya Shiksha Board strikes against Macaulay’s education system, becomes first board in India to adopt new national curriculum framework” — bing news
The 'Macaulay myth' obscures how British colonial education was itself a hybrid of Indian and European pedagogies, including the adoption of Sanskrit and Persian texts in elite institutions. Post-independence India oscillated between Nehruvian secular modernism and Gandhi’s Nai Talim, neither of which fully addressed caste or class hierarchies in schooling. The current NCF 2023 echoes the 1986 National Policy on Education’s technocratic turn, repackaged as '21st-century skills' to align with global capital.
The Bhartiya Shiksha Board’s adoption of NCF 2023 is less a decolonial triumph than a rebranding of neoliberal education under the banner of 'swadeshi' nationalism, a trick mirrored globally where decolonial rhetoric masks the imposition of competency-based, digitalised learning.
This convergence reflects the structural power of global ed-tech capital and OECD-style governance, which frame education as a marketable 'skill' rather than a public good. Yet the resistance is polyphonic: from Dalit scholars exposing caste erasure in textbooks to Adivasi activists defending land-based pedagogy, the cracks in this system reveal alternative futures. The solution lies not in binaries—tradition vs. modernity—but in a pluriversal education that centres marginalised voices, reclaims indigenous epistemologies, and rejects the surveillance capitalism embedded in NCF 2023’s digital turn. The stakes are existential: will India’s schools produce compliant labour for global capital, or citizens capable of reimagining a just world?