6 min readJun 1, 2026 05:43 PM IST First published on: Jun 1, 2026 at 05:43 PM ISTScott Anderson’s excellent book King of Kings documents the Shah of Iran’s curt reaction to food shortage warnings in 1978 as “There are no shortages, only hoarding by greedy businessmen.” The technocratic reply that “hoarding depended on shortages” angered the emperor, who then ordered people to “stop complaining and work harder”. This royal delusion — the Shah was unemployed within 12 months — echoes the regulatory cholesterol holding back a massive entrepreneurial response to India’s voracious demand for education. While tactical responses are necessary before 21 lakh-plus students retake the NEET-UG exam on June 21, the only lasting solution is to expand supply through deregulation that empowers education technocrats, such as principals and deans, to set up institutions.India’s inability to create mass prosperity arises from the low productivity of our employers and youth. Reforms over the past decade have focused on employer productivity; we must now tackle outdated regulations choking the expansion of schools, colleges, and universities. The Radhakrishnan Commission of 1948 and the Kothari Committee of 1968 responded to educator John Gardner’s challenge to design education systems that are equal and excellent. But India’s youth population today is larger than America’s total population. We are no longer a poor, new, and hesitant republic, and our education policy should stop behaving like one. This entails ending five false binaries.AdvertisementQuantity vs Quality: India has run a randomised control trial in education regulation. The Medical Council of India was bribed to keep medical capacity down, while the All India Council for Technical Education was bribed to expand engineering capacity. This means we have 16 lakh engineering seats every year, but only 1.3 lakh MBBS seats. Capitation fees have largely disappeared in engineering but exploded in medicine. Unlike Athena, who sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus in Greek mythology, educational institutions are not born adults. Over time, the goofy engineering colleges set up in the 1980s in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu have improved, providing the supply chain for India’s software industry. Nearly 30 per cent of engineering seats now lie vacant. Weak colleges are closing, and good colleges are raising faculty salaries.Public vs Private: The debates over public vs private, or foreign vs domestic, institutions are juvenile. We should only care about good vs bad schools. But India’s education regulations are obsessed with hardware over software, legal structures over learning, and input metrics over outcomes. This creates adverse selection among education entrepreneurs because success requires lying at birth (not unlike legislators’ election-spending affidavits) and lifelong regulatory “management” skills (creating a gap between how the law is written, interpreted, practised, and enforced).Also Read | To list, or not to list Tata Sons, that is our questionRepair vs Prepare: Few disagree with Mark Twain’s quip that education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire. But addressing poverty needs learning for earning as much as learning for living. This does not mean India must vocationalise school education or imitate Singapore by streaming children too early, but it does mean recognising that what we can teach someone in six months (a plumber, mason, salesperson or customer service worker) takes 15 years to learn (confidence, curiosity, creativity, or communication skills). The most important vocational skills are the old four Rs: Reading, writing, arithmetic, and relationships, and too many government schools (50 per cent of enrolment) fail at these basics. Why are half of our kids paying for something to avoid something free? Because a 21st-century education makes the strange familiar through knowledge, but also the familiar strange through questioning.AdvertisementPrice vs Cost: The challenge for great educational institutions is reconciling high costs for faculty and infrastructure, but low fees for diversity and inclusion. Predictably, debates around fair fees and reasonable profits provoke outrage. But India already knows price controls don’t work; private schools simply invent 20 different fee categories. The most expensive school is no school at all.Excellence vs Inclusion: India’s inequality of opportunity means our most valued institutions inhabit two extremes — either the IITs and IIMs, with narrow entry gates (99 per cent fail) and wide-open exits that require elimination rather than selection entry exams, or the chartered accountant qualification with wide entry gates and narrow exits (99 per cent fail). But weak competition for most schools means their wide-open entry and exit gates lead to poor learning outcomes, weak signalling value, and rotten employability.you may likeThe solution is clear: More education entrepreneurship through deregulation. Removing the state government NOC requirement for Central Board recognition — state registration is already mandatory under the Right to Education Act. Deleting the RTE clause that prescribes jail for schools that conduct admission evaluations — should we select IIT or IIM students by lottery? Allowing all companies, not just Section 8 ones, to open schools and colleges so that education technocrats can become entrepreneurs by legally raising external capital. Scrapping minimum land requirements that confuse building schools with school buildings ensures that most education entrepreneurs are politicians, crooks, and landowners. Regulations that reward legal shenanigans or regulatory “management” handicap talent without capital and capital without talent.My job in a people supply chain company involved hiring someone every five minutes for 25 years. But only hiring 5 per cent of applicants converted me to Amartya Sen’s idea of development as freedom. An uneducated Indian is not a free Indian. Coaching factories, exam leaks, nursery-school interviews, and unemployability mean an Indian child’s most important decisions are choosing their parents and pin code wisely. The solution is not licensing but supply. Competition will drive innovation in teaching, fees, productivity, multilingual instruction, gifted students, teacher training, and employability. India doesn’t need fewer cooks in the kitchen; it needs more cooks, more recipes and fewer bureaucrats guarding empty plates.The writer is co-founder of Teamlease Services and co-author of Made in India