Government school teachers are often blamed for the poor state of public education in India. Some scholars and commentators claim that they are incompetent, absent from classrooms, and overpaid, particularly when compared to teachers in the private sector. We’ll investigate if this is true.

Protiva Kundu joins us this week to discuss the state of India’s public education system by focusing on teachers. Dr Kundu is with the  Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability where she leads research on the financing of education. We’ll discuss her EPW article where she analyses data from six states to understand if teachers are the ones who are letting our system down. In the second half of the podcast, we’ll also discuss the landmark National Education Policy, 2020 and we’ll focus on its impact on teachers. Also, have a look at the interactive feature we made based on the article: http://bit.ly/teachers-epw. 

Audio courtesy: The last ones by Jahzzar [CC BY-SA 3.0].