India built one of the world's largest education systems. But it never built the institution responsible for improving it.
Every few months, India debates curriculum, examinations, regulation, teacher shortages, employability or artificial intelligence. Governments announce reforms. Philanthropists build schools. Universities launch new programs. Yet one question is almost never asked.
What if India's greatest educational challenge is not that we need better schools or better universities, but that we never built the institution responsible for making all of them better?
Every mature education system has one—not another regulator or examination board, but an institution devoted to improving education itself: understanding how people learn, how teachers improve, how leaders are developed and how educational systems become stronger over time.
Singapore's National Institute of Education occupies a remarkable position. It trains teachers, develops principals, conducts research, advises the government and studies how educational practice evolves. It is simultaneously a graduate school, a research institution and a national capability builder. That combination—not simply academic prestige—is what makes it influential.
Similar institutions exist elsewhere. The Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong has helped shape educational research and leadership across Asia. UCL's Institute of Education has influenced teacher education and policy well beyond the UK. Harvard Graduate School of Education and Teachers College at Columbia have played comparable roles in the United States and internationally.
Their influence comes not because they educate the largest number of students, but because they continuously improve the system around them. They have become the intellectual centres of their education systems.
India, despite the scale of its education system, has no obvious equivalent.
India certainly has institutions that work on education. We have teacher-training colleges, regulatory bodies, research centres and universities with education departments. Their contributions matter. But none was designed to serve as the country's intellectual centre for education itself—bringing together research, leadership development, policy advice and system improvement under one roof.
That distinction matters. Imagine if medicine had no great medical schools conducting research. Or engineering had no institutions advancing engineering itself. Yet in education we have largely accepted that the people responsible for teaching and nurturing the next generation need no comparable intellectual infrastructure.
That institutional absence has consequences we rarely discuss. When governments redesign curriculum, where does the evidence come from? When states attempt large-scale school reform, where is the institution documenting what worked? Who studies leadership in Indian schools? Who develops the next generation of university vice-chancellors? Who builds a serious body of Indian research on teaching, learning, assessment, AI in education or educational leadership.
Perhaps this absence is understandable. For decades, India's educational challenge was access. The priority was opening schools, expanding universities and bringing millions into the system. An institution devoted to improving educational quality could seem like a luxury when the system itself was still being built. But India's challenge has changed. India is no longer primarily trying to expand education. It is trying to improve it at scale. That requires a different kind of institution.
Instead, responsibility became fragmented across regulators, ministries, councils and departments.
The questions confronting education today are different from those that shaped the last generation of reform. How should artificial intelligence change teaching? What should universities teach when knowledge is instantly accessible? How should schools prepare students for lives and careers that are increasingly unpredictable?
These are not questions that can be answered through regulation alone. They require institutions whose job is to study them continuously. Governments change. Policies change. Ministers change. Great institutions remain.
After spending the past decade working alongside schools, universities, governments and philanthropies, I have increasingly come to believe that the missing institution is not another university.
It is a great School of Education.
Such an institution would become the country's intellectual centre for education: the place where governments seek advice, where school leaders are developed, where evidence is generated, where educational technologies are evaluated, where new models are tested and where the country's most important educational questions are investigated.
It would not judge its success by the number of degrees it awards or the size of its campus. It would judge itself by something far harder: the number of schools it improves, the universities it strengthens, the leaders it develops and the ideas that reshape educational practice.
India built schools. It built universities. It built regulators. It built examination boards. Perhaps the next institution it needs to build is one whose sole purpose is to make all of them better.
Shreyasi Singh is the founding managing partner of Jetri, an education consulting and strategic implementation firm.