India’s First Education Minister

The scale of the problem in 1947 is easy to state and hard to imagine. Literacy across the country was low. The great majority of children were not in school, and the great majority of those who were, were boys. Teacher training was thin. School buildings, in much of rural India, did not exist.

Higher education was small and concentrated. There was no national machinery for funding universities or for maintaining standards between them. There were very few institutions capable of producing engineers, applied scientists or research scholars at anything like the scale a modern economy would require, and no coordinated system for planning technical education across the country.

Against that, the new government had almost no money, a refugee crisis, an unfinished constitution and a partitioned administration. Every decision about education in this period was a decision about what to do first.

Azad’s first commitment was to universal primary education: free and compulsory schooling for children, treated as an obligation of the state rather than an aspiration. Government sources record this as a consistent theme of his ministry.

The principle was written into the constitutional settlement he helped bring about. The Constitution adopted in 1949 directed the state to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of fourteen, within ten years. That deadline was not met — it took India considerably longer, and the right to education was not made enforceable until 2009 — but the direction was set in the first decade, and Azad was among those who set it.

It is worth being honest about the gap between commitment and delivery. Azad himself was, by all accounts, impatient about it. The historical significance of the period is not that the problem was solved but that the obligation was accepted, publicly and at the highest level, as belonging to the state.

Government sources record Azad’s specific and repeated emphasis on the education of women and girls. In the India of the late 1940s this was neither uncontroversial nor cheap: female literacy was far below male literacy, girls left school earlier where they attended at all, and in many regions the social obstacles were more binding than the financial ones.

The way he framed the argument is the part worth preserving. Girls’ education was not presented as a welfare measure or a matter of fairness alone, but as a question of national capacity: a country that educates half its population has decided, in advance, to operate at half strength. Committees and commissions established during this period took up the question of women’s education as part of the wider reconstruction of the school and university system.

Azad’s portfolio was expanded to include natural resources and scientific research, which tells you where the government’s priorities lay and where his own did. He argued for scientific education not as a specialism for a few but as part of what a general education ought to contain — a disposition towards evidence rather than a body of technical facts.

That position followed directly from his own intellectual history. A scholar who had taught himself mathematics and the natural sciences alongside a classical religious curriculum was unlikely to accept that the two were in competition, and he did not. His public argument was consistently that scientific inquiry and cultural inheritance are complementary, and that a country needs both to be confident in either.

The decisive institutional developments of Azad’s tenure were in technical and higher education. The first Indian Institute of Technology was established at Kharagpur in 1951, following the recommendation of a committee appointed to consider higher technical education; it became the model for the network that followed. The All India Council for Technical Education, which had been set up as an advisory body in 1945, operated within his ministry through this period as technical education expanded.

In higher education more broadly, the central problem was coordination: universities were multiplying without a national mechanism for funding them or maintaining standards between them. The University Grants Commission was created to solve it. Azad formally inaugurated the UGC on 28 December 1953; it was given statutory footing by an Act of Parliament in 1956 and remains the central body in Indian higher education.

Azad’s ministry also built the cultural infrastructure of the new republic. Three national academies were established between 1952 and 1954 — for the performing arts, for letters, and for the visual arts — giving each field a standing national body. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations was founded in April 1950 with Azad as its first president, to manage India’s cultural relations with other countries.

Placing culture inside the education portfolio was itself an argument. It said that a country’s literature, music, dance, theatre and art are part of its educational endowment rather than decoration, and that they need public support on the same footing as laboratories and universities.

Underneath all of it sat a single claim, which is the reason Azad’s name is attached to India’s education debate seventy years later. A democracy asks its citizens to make judgements — about candidates, arguments, evidence and each other — and the quality of those judgements is a function of how well the citizens have been taught to make them.

On that view, education policy is not one department’s business among many. It is the maintenance schedule for the political system itself. Azad said so repeatedly, and he acted on it for eleven years in a ministry that had less money than it needed and more to do than it could manage.

He died in office on 22 February 1958. Since 2008 his birth anniversary, 11 November, has been observed across India as National Education Day.