This article originally appeared in Education Times (The Times of India) on August 22, 2026.
India has built one of the world's largest education systems. Yet it has never built the institution dedicated to improving it. Every few months, the country debates curriculum, examinations, regulation, teacher shortages, employability or, more recently, artificial intelligence. Governments announce new policies and universities launch new programmes. Philanthropists invest in schools. Yet amid these conversations, one fundamental question is rarely asked.
Who is responsible for improving education itself? What if India's greatest challenge is not that it needs better schools or better universities, but that it never created the institution responsible for helping all of them become better?
Every high-performing education system has one—not another regulator or examination board, but an institution devoted to understanding how people learn, improving teaching, developing educational leaders, generating evidence and helping education systems evolve over time.
Around the world, such institutions have shaped education for decades. Harvard Graduate School of Education has influenced generations of educational leaders. Stanford Graduate School of Education helped establish learning sciences as a rigorous academic discipline. Teachers College at Columbia transformed teacher education, while UCL's Institute of Education emerged as a global leader in education research. Singapore's National Institute of Education sits at the heart of one of the world's highest-performing school systems, preparing teachers, conducting research and informing national policy.
What made these institutions influential was something else entirely. Their influence came because they continuously improved the system around them. They became the intellectual infrastructure behind education.
We educate more than 250 million school students and over 40 million students in higher education. We employ millions of teachers. We operate one of the largest education systems on earth. Yet ask a simple question. Which institution shapes how India thinks about education?
There is no obvious answer. India has institutions that regulate education, fund it, inspect it and administer it. What it lacks is an institution whose primary purpose is to make every other educational institution better. The distinction is critical.
Imagine a healthcare system without leading medical schools advancing medical science, or an engineering sector without institutions driving innovation in engineering itself. Yet in education we have largely accepted that the people responsible for teaching 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? These are not merely policy questions, but institutional ones.
India has already demonstrated its ability to build transformative institutions. The IIMs reshaped management while AIIMS reshaped medical education. Yet education itself never received an equivalent institution. Responsibility has instead been dispersed across ministries, regulators, councils and departments, leaving one of the world's largest education systems without a recognised intellectual centre.
The questions confronting education today are fundamentally different from those of a generation ago. How should artificial intelligence reshape teaching? What should universities teach when knowledge is instantly accessible? How should schools prepare students for careers and lives that are becoming increasingly uncertain?
These challenges cannot be addressed through regulation alone. They require institutions whose purpose is to study them continuously. Governments change. Policies evolve. Ministers come and go. Great institutions endure.
It is a great School of Education. Such an institution would become 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 be another teacher-training college or another university chasing rankings. Its purpose would be far more ambitious: to improve education itself.
Its success would not be measured by the number of degrees it awards or the size of its campus, but by the schools it strengthens, the universities it transforms, the leaders it develops and the ideas that reshape educational practice across the country.
India does not lack educational institutions. It lacks the institution whose purpose is to strengthen all the others.
Countries are transformed not only by great schools and universities, but by institutions that enable every school, university and policymaker to become better. That, ultimately, may be the missing institution in Indian education.
