Launched in August 2004, the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) scheme was designed in response to measurable gender, rural, and social disparities in upper-primary education. Its target areas were Educationally Backward Blocks (EBBs), defined using 2001 Census thresholds of rural female literacy below 46.13% and a rural literacy gender gap above 21.59 percentage points.
Ever since Independence, India's sports policy has, at best, been viewed primarily through the lenses of international competition and national prestige and, at worst, through the lens of public scrutiny following disappointing performances on the global stage. India has often been described as a "sleeping giant" in world sports, a country with immense talent and demographic potential, yet constrained by persistent logistical, infrastructural, and institutional challenges.
India's demographic dividend is the biggest economic asset that the country has but a long-standing mismatch between academic learning and industry demanded skills has been a longstanding issue of restricting the employment of the youth. The Government of India's primary intervention has been the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS), a flagship Central Sector Scheme (CSS) of Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), which was started in August 2016 under Apprentices Act, 1961 and relaunched as NAPS 2.0 in FY 2022-23 to expand the outreach, easy disbursal of stipend and increase penetration into Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
Jawaharlal Nehru once described India as an ‘ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and experience had been written, with no succeeding layer ever wholly erasing what had gone before.’ The National Mission on Cultural Mapping (NMCM) - a Ministry of Culture initiative launched in 2017 to translate India's artisanal & village-level heritage into a national database - takes this Nehruvian idea as its working premise (Ministry of Culture, 2026a). After nearly a decade of the scheme running and roughly 97 percent of its village target reportedly covered, making it a valuable case study in the sustained & data-driven implementation of a large-scale rural mission.(Ministry of Culture, 2026b).
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 called for removing the 'hard separation' between school, higher and vocational education. It proposed an Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) to facilitate the accumulation and mobility of credits (Ministry of Education, 2020). To operationalise this vision, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship constituted a High-Level Committee in November 2021 to develop a common credit framework for general and vocational education (Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, 2021; University Grants Commission, 2023).
For years, Indian sport operated on an unwritten principle: no matter how messy a federation’s internal politics became, courts and ad hoc committees would eventually sort it out. That informal arrangement came to an end in August 2022 when FIFA suspended the All India Football Federation, citing undue influence from a Supreme Court-appointed committee overseeing its affairs. This temporary but unprecedented suspension threatened India's hosting of the FIFA Under-17 Women's World Cup just days before kick-off.
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), not only in India but around the world. When one talks of IKS, one immediately thinks of classical Sanskrit texts and elite academies.