Sonam Wangchuk hunger strike became one of India’s defining protests of 2026, but its significance extends far beyond a single political moment. This feature journeys through centuries of hunger strikes—from ancient Ireland to Gandhi and modern India—to understand why the human body continues to be used as the ultimate instrument of democratic dissent.

Sonam Wangchuk gave up food at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in June 2026, protesting more than just another exam paper leak controversy. The fast was a response to a crisis that had shattered the confidence of millions of Indian students, and it also brought back one of the oldest and most ethically disturbing forms of political protest: the hunger strike. For 26 days, the 59-year-old engineer, school reformer, and climate innovator made his own body a place of protest. The simple demand: India’s education minister should resign after multiple exam paper leaks put countless academic futures at risk. But the outcome was not a quiet one. Days went by, supporters gathered round him, political leaders begged him to end the protest, and eventually Delhi Police physically removed him from the protest site and took him to hospital, acting on Delhi High Court orders issued on medical advice. Organisers said it was done against his will; police said it was necessary for his safety. Either way, the decision was taken out of his hands.

The movement did not end with him. In the days after his removal, police used tear gas to disperse students marching toward Parliament, several protesters were injured, and public anger only hardened. On 25 July, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced his resignation, writing that he was “pained to see the events of the past 10 days.” The Cockroach Janta Party, the youth movement that had organised the sit-in, declared its demands met and called off the protest. Wangchuk had set the demand in motion and paid the heaviest personal cost for it, but the concession itself came four days after he had already been carried out of the square — a reminder that a hunger strike’s power often lies less in the faster’s endurance than in what it makes everyone else unable to look away from. As with previous hunger strikes, the political result was only half the story. The act itself launched a national conversation that routine petitions, speeches, and marches had failed to keep alive.

The Family Legacy Behind Sonam Wangchuk Hunger Strike

For Wangchuk, fasting has become a regular tool of his political resistance, and not always a peaceful one in its consequences. Two years earlier, he had survived for twenty-one days without food in the freezing temperatures of Leh, demanding constitutional safeguards for Ladakh through inclusion in the Sixth Schedule and a renewed dialogue on statehood. He fasted again that October. Then, in September 2025, he began another hunger strike in Leh over the same demand — one that ended very differently from the others. Days into the fast, clashes broke out elsewhere in the city; buildings and police vehicles were burned, and four people were killed.

The federal government said Wangchuk’s rhetoric had contributed to the violence and detained him without trial under India’s National Security Act, a law that permits custody for up to a year without formal charge. He spent nearly six months in a jail more than a thousand kilometres from home before the detention was revoked in March 2026. Wangchuk denied inciting the violence and asked for an independent inquiry into the deaths; his wife challenged the detention before the Supreme Court, arguing it relied on complaints that predated the unrest. The matter remains legally unresolved.

The topics have shifted, from environmental governance to educational reform, but the approach has remained remarkably consistent. Each fast is a statement of the same principle: that when the institutions won’t listen, voluntary suffering can make society listen. What the September 2025 episode adds, uncomfortably, is a reminder that the state can respond to that suffering with force rather than dialogue — and that the person fasting bears that risk alone. Sonam Wangchuk’s conviction is rooted far beyond himself.

A Hunger-Torn Legacy

Long before Sonam became an internationally renowned innovator, his father Sonam Wangyal had already used fasting as a political tool. Wangyal, a prominent leader in the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, fought for Scheduled Tribe status and constitutional protections for Ladakh’s tribal communities. He, like his son, came to see that traditional political negotiations often didn’t work. In 1984, his hunger strike drew the personal intervention of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who travelled to Leh, met him, and persuaded him to end the fast with an assurance that the demand would be addressed. The image is still powerfully significant. It represents not only the moral force that fasting can sometimes generate but also an older political culture in which governments felt it necessary to publicly respond when citizens are willing to risk their own lives for a public cause.

Wangchuk usually describes his own movement as his father’s unfinished business. Though the constitutional demands may have been different over the years, the fundamental fight for recognition, dignity, and political voice has persisted through generations. And that continuity is an unnerving concern as well. Is the hunger strike political success or democratic failure if every generation has to use the same tactic for the same recognition?

Ancient Form of Protest

The hunger strike is often linked to Gandhi or modern India, but its roots go far deeper. Troscadh, a practice acknowledged by early Irish legal traditions, was in place centuries before constitutional democracies. If a person felt that they had been wronged, they could fast outside the offender’s house. The aim was not violence or coercion in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, it used public shaming. There was considerable social stigma associated with allowing another person to suffer openly at one’s doorstep, often demanding settlement if legal procedures failed. The premise was simple and deceptively so.

A person with little institutional power was able to turn private suffering into public accountability. With time, this moral reasoning grew to a wide range of political circumstances. Marion Wallace Dunlop was a British suffragette who refused to eat after being jailed for campaigning for women’s right to vote. Her protest inspired dozens of other activists, eventually prompting British officials to resort to force-feeding, a barbaric procedure that drew more sympathy for the suffrage cause than imprisonment itself. Terence MacSwiney, an Irish republican leader, died in British custody after a 74-day hunger strike. His death reverberated around the world and spurred international support for Irish independence. Six decades later, Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners would make the same sacrifice inside the Maze Prison, turning the prison walls into one of the most important political battlegrounds of twentieth-century Northern Ireland.

In India, fasting has traditionally been a form of resistance. Jatin Das, who was jailed with Bhagat Singh, died in Lahore Central Jail after fasting for 63 days to protest the treatment of political prisoners under British rule. His funeral attracted massive crowds all over northern India, transforming a private act of suffering into a public expression of anti-colonial sentiment. These incidents, split by country and generation, reveal a startling connectedness. Hunger strikes rarely succeed, because governments don’t suddenly develop empathy. They work because visible suffering raises the political cost of staying apathetic. No one understands this dynamic better than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi never used fasting to wring concessions from his opponents. It was an exhibition of satyagraha — the search for truth through self-discipline and self-suffering rather than through violence against others. For Gandhi, voluntary suffering was a moral appeal not just to rulers but to society, whether to oppose communal violence, caste discrimination, or to seek reconciliation after Partition. The protester did not seek to defeat an opponent in his worldview. Instead, they wanted to awaken the conscience of all. This moral insight into political resistance would have an immense impact on later movements in India and elsewhere. But the hunger strike is not only a historical custom. It also surfaces long-standing questions about the connection between power, the human body, and democratic accountability — questions that reverberate every time a protester refuses to eat in the name of justice.

When Democracy Stops Listening

Hunger strikes continue because they occupy a special niche in democratic politics: they are not violent acts or ordinary expressions of discontent but moral appeals that force communities to confront hard questions. They demonstrate the limits of institutional responses by transforming the human body into the ultimate vehicle of political communication. This method has stood the test of time, from the doorsteps of ancient Ireland to Gandhi’s satyagraha, from Jatin Das’s martyrdom to Sonam Wangchuk’s repeated fasts, not for its ability to bring political victory but for its ability to expose the moral price of official indifference. Its effectiveness has always been hit or miss. Hunger strikes have sometimes changed laws and institutions and sometimes brought only silence, jail, or death — in the space of a single year, Wangchuk’s own record now contains all three: a minister’s resignation, and, five months earlier, a detention without trial. Even if they don’t succeed in forcing instant policy change, they often succeed in changing public perception and reminding voters that democracy is as much about listening as it is about governance.

Wangchuk’s strikes raise a question that extends beyond Ladakh or exam reforms: why do citizens in the world’s largest democracy still believe the best way to be heard is by starving themselves? A healthy democracy has no business asking the people to risk their lives before their grievances are rectified. If peaceful self-sacrifice remains one of the most powerful forms of political expression, the real problem is not with those who fast, but with the institutions that make them feel they have no choice.

About the authors:

Pratyusha Pan is an English literature researcher whose work explores memory, history, and political thought.

Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political research analysis, ESG research, and energy policy.

Sonam Wangchuk turned a 5% pass rate into 75%, engineered an artificial glacier that needs no electricity, and seeded a university with his own prize money. He has also spent six months in jail under India’s National Security Act, and this July was hospitalized after a three-week hunger strike in Delhi. This profile separates the engineering record from the ongoing legal and political fight — and reports both without resolving either.

Sonam Wangchuk has spent nearly four decades building things designed to work without him: a school where students, not staff, set the rules; an artificial glacier that needs no electricity or pump; a university seeded with his own prize money rather than a donor’s. He has also, over the past two years, been jailed under one of India’s most restrictive security laws, had his organisation’s foreign-funding licence revoked by the federal government, watched a protest he was supporting while on hunger strike descend into violence in which four people were killed. Both of these are true, and both are part of the record.

This piece separates the two. It sets out, with as much precision as the public record allows, what Sonam Wangchuk actually built and measured in education and engineering — and then reports, without taking a side, on the legal and political conflict that has consumed much of the last eighteen months of his public life.

The education crisis that inspired Sonam Wangchuk. The diagnosis: 1988

Sonam Wangchuk was born in 1966 in a village near Alchi, in what was then Jammu and Kashmir’s Ladakh region. He trained as a mechanical engineer at what is now the National Institute of Technology, Srinagar. In 1988, together with his brother and five friends, he founded the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL).

The problem they set out to address was specific: at the time, close to 95% of Ladakhi students were failing their Class 10 board examinations. Wangchuk’s explanation, restated in interviews for decades since, was that the curriculum was the wrong one for the place — children who spoke Ladakhi or Tibetan at home were taught in Urdu and English, memorising material with no relevance to a high-altitude cold desert.

SECMOL’s campus near Leh took students who had already failed their board exams — failure was the admission criterion, not marks. The school ran on student self-governance: pupils cooked, budgeted, and voted on rules. Wangchuk designed the buildings himself: passive-solar structures of rammed earth that held an interior temperature of roughly 15°C even when it was minus 15°C outside, without any purchased heating.

Regional pass rates climbed from around 5% to close to 75% over the following two decades, according to figures compiled by SECMOL and the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives. That reversal is not attributable to SECMOL alone. It happened under Operation New Hope, a joint effort involving the state government, the local school system, and several NGOs, of which SECMOL was one. What is specifically attributable to Wangchuk is the diagnosis that anchored the wider reform, and the SECMOL campus itself, which functioned as both training ground and proof of concept for it.

The Ice Stupa: What the Record Shows, and What Critics Say

Ladakh’s farmers face a seasonal mismatch: glacial meltwater arrives in June, sowing season starts in April. In January and February 2014, Sonam Wangchuk and a group of SECMOL students built a test structure in Leh — a roughly six-metre cone holding about 150,000 litres, built with no shade, no machinery, just gravity-fed piping and freezing night air. Piled water froze into a cone rather than spreading flat, the way earlier artificial glaciers had; a cone’s smaller surface-area-to-volume ratio means it loses less ice to direct sun. The structure held until 18 May, weeks into a season with daytime temperatures above 20°C.

That result persuaded Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche, a senior Buddhist leader who visited and blessed the prototype, to offer land at Phyang village for a full-scale version. Built the following winter, it was roughly 20 metres tall and stored an estimated two million litres — more than ten times the first prototype. Figures compiled by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water put the count at 52 functioning ice stupas in Ladakh a few years after 2019, with additional pilot structures elsewhere, including a confirmed installation in Switzerland’s Val Roseg valley (2016) built with Wangchuk’s direct involvement, and an independently developed project in Chile’s Andes that has cited the Ladakh design as its starting point.

Independent researchers have raised real limitations. A 2019 study by the geographer Marcus Nüsser and colleagues, cited by the climate-adaptation research group climateinterventions.org, found that ice stupas require substantial ongoing maintenance, investment, and construction labour, can only store limited volumes of water relative to the effort involved, and — because they divert water that would otherwise flow into rivers — can carry knock-on effects for communities and ecosystems downstream. None of this contradicts the basic engineering result Wangchuk demonstrated; it does complicate the more sweeping claims sometimes made on his behalf about the technique as a scalable, general-purpose fix for Himalayan water scarcity.

HIAL, and the funding fight that followed

Sonam Wangchuk’s plans for a university predate his exit from SECMOL’s day-to-day leadership. By the time he collected the 2016 Rolex Award for Enterprise — 100,000 Swiss francs, then worth roughly ₹67–68 lakh (about US$104,000) — reporting from the ceremony described him as already “busy establishing” the new institution, with the Leh Autonomous Hill Development Council and the Drikung Kagyu Cultural Welfare Society allocating land for it. He put the entire prize toward it as seed funding. The Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL) was formally founded with his wife and collaborator, Gitanjali J. Angmo, in 2017; Wangchuk stepped back from SECMOL’s leadership only in 2018, by which point HIAL was already underway. According to Angmo, more than 400 students had passed through the institute by 2025.

That funding relationship became contested in 2025. In August, the Ladakh administration cancelled a 40-year land lease it had granted HIAL in 2018, citing non-execution of a formal lease deed and lack of progress on construction. The Wire, examining official correspondence, reported that the delay in executing the deed stemmed from the administration’s own unfinished “New Lease Policy,” despite repeated requests from HIAL to formalise the agreement — an account the Ladakh administration disputes; officials have said HIAL violated the terms of the original allotment. Angmo has separately alleged that a federal minister told her the lease would stay frozen unless Wangchuk abandoned his campaign for Ladakh’s inclusion in the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule. That allegation could not be independently verified for this piece, and no official response to it appears in the public record reviewed here.

In September 2025, the federal Ministry of Home Affairs cancelled SECMOL’s licence to receive foreign donations under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, citing irregularities in its 2021–22 accounts — chiefly a cash deposit of ₹3.5 lakh that SECMOL said was the sale proceeds of an old bus bought years earlier with foreign funds, an explanation the ministry called insufficient. The Central Bureau of Investigation opened a parallel inquiry into HIAL’s foreign funding and into a trip Wangchuk made to Pakistan in February 2025. As of this writing, that inquiry’s outcome has not been made public.

The political fight: statehood, a hunger strike, and a riot

Since Ladakh’s 2019 reorganisation into a Union Territory without a local legislature, Sonam Wangchuk has campaigned for full statehood and for extending the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule protections to the region — protections that would give local bodies greater authority over land and resources. He announced a five-day fast in January 2023, led a 21-day fast in March 2024, and fasted again that October, each time pressing the same demand.

In September 2025, Wangchuk began a hunger strike in Leh in support of the same cause. On 24 September, after 14 days of fasting, protesters at the site moved away and clashes broke out elsewhere in the city; buildings and police vehicles were burned, and police opened fire. Four people were killed and, depending on the account, between 70 and 100 were injured — the worst unrest Ladakh had seen in years. Wangchuk ended his fast and publicly condemned the violence.

The federal government’s position, stated by the Ministry of Home Affairs, was that Wangchuk’s speeches — which it said had invoked the Arab Spring and the 2025 Gen Z protests in Nepal — had “guided” the crowd toward violence. Two days after the deaths, he was arrested and detained under the National Security Act, a law that permits preventive detention for up to twelve months without formal trial. He was held in Jodhpur Central Jail, more than 1,000 kilometres from Ladakh.

Sonam Wangchuk denied inciting the violence. In a letter released from jail, he called it “the saddest day of his life” and asked for an independent judicial inquiry into the four deaths, adding that he was prepared to remain in custody until one was held. His wife challenged the detention before the Supreme Court, arguing it relied on stale or unrelated police complaints — by her account, three of the five FIRs cited predated the September violence entirely, and three did not name Wangchuk at all.

The Court agreed to hear the case; a bench questioned why Angmo had not been given the grounds for the detention, as required by precedent. Before the matter was fully resolved in court, the federal government revoked the detention on 14 March 2026, “after due consideration,” and Wangchuk was released after nearly six months. It is not publicly clear whether any underlying charges against him were dropped.

Three months after his release, in June 2026, Wangchuk began a new hunger strike in New Delhi — this time in support of a youth-led protest group calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, demanding the resignation of India’s federal education minister over a series of examination paper leaks. He fasted for roughly three weeks before being taken to hospital by Delhi Police; opposition politicians had publicly urged him to stop, citing his health.

This account has tried to state the competing claims plainly rather than adjudicate them: the government’s position that Wangchuk’s rhetoric contributed to fatal violence, and Wangchuk’s and his wife’s position that the detention was a pretext to end his activism, are both matters of ongoing legal dispute, not settled fact. Readers wanting the fullest, most current picture of that dispute are better served by ongoing news coverage than by a profile written for an education and science audience.

The “3 Idiots” connection

In 2009, the Bollywood film 3 Idiots featured Phunsukh Wangdu, an inventor who rejects rote learning. Wangchuk has said the character was inspired by, rather than based directly on, his work, and has generally kept some distance from the comparison. It nonetheless made him recognisable to a much wider Indian public than his engineering or education record alone would have.

The awards record

By 2025, Wangchuk had received close to 15 national and international honours, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2018) — often described as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — the Rolex Award for Enterprise (2016), the Fred M. Packard Award (2016) for protected-area leadership, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2017), an Ashoka Fellowship (2002), the Real Heroes Award (2008), and recognition as “Eminent Technologist of the Himalayan Region” from IIT Mandi (2018). He has also appeared as a panellist at Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm.

Two records, not one

Wangchuk’s engineering and education work has a clear, checkable structure: a defined problem, a low-cost intervention, and a mechanism — student self-governance at SECMOL, a maintenance-free physical design in the Ice Stupa — meant to let the fix outlast its inventor’s direct involvement. Independent researchers have found real limits to how far that model scales, particularly with the Ice Stupa, but the underlying results — the pass-rate shift, the functioning prototypes — are documented by more than his own organisations.

His political record over the past two years is a live, contested legal matter involving a federal law, a state government, a Supreme Court petition, and four deaths whose full circumstances have not been publicly settled. Presenting that record honestly means reporting the claims of both the state and the activist without resolving them — which is what this piece has tried to do, rather than folding one story into the other.

A Sonam Wangchuk hunger strike over exam leaks has put education back in the headlines. The data underneath the headlines tells a more complicated story about India’s education system than any single protest can.

On a hot July afternoon at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, Sonam Wangchuk sat on an indefinite hunger strike for the third week running. The Ladakhi educationist, known for decades of quiet work on schooling in the trans-Himalayan region long before he became a familiar face on the evening news, was not protesting for Ladakh this time. He was protesting for something that touches every Indian household with a child preparing for a competitive exam: the integrity of the system that decides who gets to become a doctor, an engineer, or a civil servant.

His demand was blunt — the resignation of the Union Education Minister, over the repeated leaking of question papers, most recently NEET-UG. By mid-July, doctors at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital had moved him in for observation as his health declined. Whatever one makes of the politics around him, the strike forced a question into the open that has been sitting quietly under the surface for years: is something actually wrong with Indian education, or is this one more news cycle that will pass once the cameras move on?

The honest answer, once you sit with the numbers, is both. Some things are visibly getting better. Others have been broken for so long that the system now treats the brokenness as normal.

India’s Education System Is at a Crossroads

Start with the trigger for Wangchuk’s protest, because it is the most visible symptom. In May 2026, the National Testing Agency did something it had never done before — it cancelled NEET-UG itself, the exam held on 3 May, after a leak scandal, and handed the matter to the CBI. It was not the first time. NEET’s predecessor, AIPMT, was scrapped entirely in 2015 after the Supreme Court called it a national shame. NEET 2024 produced 67 students with a perfect score of 720 out of 720, an anomaly that triggered nationwide protests; the Supreme Court eventually let the exam stand but ordered a limited re-test for 1,563 candidates after acknowledging that at least 155 students had directly benefited from a leak in Bihar. Independent tallies of major recruitment and entrance exams — NEET, UGC-NET, state police and teacher-eligibility tests among them — count at least eight to a dozen serious leak episodes between 2024 and 2026 alone.

This is not a story about one exam or one government. It is a story about what happens when a country tries to sort tens of millions of young people through a small number of high-stakes gates, using an examination infrastructure that has not kept pace with the scale of demand it is asked to manage. Roughly 2.3 million candidates sit for NEET each year. When the gate itself cannot be trusted, the damage is not abstract — it lands on families who spent years and savings preparing a child for a fair shot.

The Money Question Nobody Quite Answers

Wangchuk’s protest is about exams, but the deeper argument about Indian education has always been about money — specifically, how much of it the state is willing to commit.

In 1966, the Kothari Commission recommended that India spend 6 percent of GDP on education. Sixty years on, the country has never got there. The Economic Survey’s own figures show total education spending — centre and states combined — sliding from 2.8 percent of GDP in 2017-19 to 2.7 percent in 2021-22, before edging back to around 2.9 percent more recently. The Union Budget for 2026-27 gave education its largest rupee allocation ever, ₹1,39,289 crore, split roughly ₹83,562 crore for schools and ₹55,727 crore for higher education. The headline sounds generous. But measured against a Union Budget that has itself grown to over ₹53 lakh crore, education’s share has actually shrunk — down to about 2.6 percent of the total outlay, compared with roughly 3 percent a few budgets ago. The rupee number grows every year; the priority, measured as a share of what the country spends on everything else, has been quietly declining.

Compare this with what other economies do. Developed nations typically spend upward of 10 percent of GDP on education when private and public spending are combined; India’s combined centre-state figure sits closer to 4-5 percent, and the Union government’s own direct spending is a much smaller sliver of that. This is the least politically charged number in the whole debate — it has stayed roughly the same distance from the 6 percent target under governments of every stripe. That consistency is itself a data point: underfunding education relative to ambition is not a partisan failure, it is a structural one.

Where the National Education Policy actually stands

Much of the reform activity in Indian education over the last five years has been an attempt to implement the National Education Policy of 2020, the third such policy since Independence and the first sweeping rewrite of school and higher education since 1986. It is worth pausing on where that project actually stands, because the honest picture is split down the middle: the school-level changes are running roughly on schedule, while the bigger institutional promises in higher education are not.

On the school side, the old 10+2 structure has been replaced by the 5+3+3+4 framework — foundational, preparatory, middle and secondary stages — and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education, which spells out what each stage is meant to teach, was notified in 2023. The push for mother-tongue or regional-language instruction up to Class 5 is underway, unevenly, across states. Crucially, the foundational literacy and numeracy campaign under NIPUN Bharat is the same effort ASER 2024 credited for the reading and arithmetic gains described later in this piece — which suggests that where NEP’s school-level reforms have actually reached classrooms, the data backs them up.

Higher education tells a different story. The Academic Bank of Credits, which lets students bank and transfer credits across institutions, is operational and covers more than 620 universities. The Common University Entrance Test is in its sixth year and now draws over 25 lakh applicants. The four-year undergraduate degree with multiple entry and exit points has been adopted by most central universities, though state universities have been slower, citing faculty shortages and infrastructure gaps. Three foreign university campuses are now running on Indian soil under the new rules.

But NEP’s central institutional promise — a single Higher Education Commission of India to replace the UGC, AICTE, NCTE and the tangle of professional councils that currently regulate different corners of higher education — has not materialised. A bill to create it was introduced in 2024 and lapsed without being passed. The UGC and AICTE continue to function exactly as they did before the policy was announced. And the policy’s own financial ask has not been met either: NEP 2020 revives the same 6 percent of GDP figure the Kothari Commission proposed in 1966, while actual spending sits closer to 2.9 to 3.2 percent — the policy, in other words, inherited the funding gap rather than closing it.

There is a federal dimension to this too, worth noting without taking a side in it. Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal have resisted the three-language formula and declined to sign the MoUs required for the PM-SHRI school scheme, arguing the conditions attached amount to a central mandate on a subject the Constitution places on the Concurrent List, shared between the Centre and the states. The Centre, in turn, withheld Samagra Shiksha funds from states that did not sign, a decision Tamil Nadu has contested in the Supreme Court. Whatever the merits on either side, it illustrates a structural reality that any national education reform in India has to work through: education is not one government’s to redesign alone, and disagreements over pace and design are, in some sense, built into the system rather than a sign that the system has failed.

What that money buys — or doesn’t

Numbers on spending, and on policy intent, only matter if they translate into what children in a classroom actually know. Here the picture, to its credit, is not uniformly grim.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, which surveys reading and arithmetic among roughly 6.5 lakh rural children, found the sharpest improvement in learning outcomes since 2022 — the biggest gains coming, notably, in government rather than private schools. The share of Class 3 government-school students able to read a Class 2-level text rose from 16.3 percent to 23.4 percent between 2022 and 2024, and those able to do subtraction jumped from about 20 percent to nearly 28 percent over the same period.

Read that again, though, and the improvement looks smaller against the baseline it started from. Even after this recovery, roughly three in four Class 3 students still cannot read a simple Class 2-level passage, and about two in three Class 3 students and seven in ten Class 5 students still struggle with basic arithmetic. This is the uncomfortable middle ground Indian education sits in: real, measurable progress, layered on top of a foundational learning crisis so deep that “progress” still leaves most children behind grade level.

Teachers: more of them, but not where they are needed

The government’s own UDISE+ data, released this year, shows school education crossing a symbolic threshold — over 1.02 crore teachers nationwide, up from 94.8 lakh just three years earlier. Pupil-teacher ratios have improved across every level and now sit comfortably inside the 30:1 ceiling the National Education Policy recommends. Dropout rates have fallen too: at the secondary level, from 8.2 percent in 2024-25 to 7 percent in 2025-26; at the preparatory level, from 2.3 percent to 1.8 percent over the same year.

Set against this, a Parliamentary Standing Committee report flagged something the aggregate numbers hide — vacancy rates of 30 to 50 percent in central schools like Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, and roughly 10 lakh unfilled teaching posts in Samagra Shiksha-funded state schools, more than 7.5 lakh of them at the elementary level. A national average can look healthy while entire school networks remain understaffed. The pattern recurs across almost every education indicator in India: the country-wide figure moves in the right direction while the distribution underneath it stays deeply uneven, with rural districts, tribal blocks and a handful of states consistently carrying the shortfall.

Higher education’s arithmetic problem

Beyond school, the picture gets harder still. The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education — the share of 18-to-23-year-olds actually enrolled — has climbed from around 24 percent a decade ago to roughly 32-33 percent now. NITI Aayog has said India would need something like 2,500 universities to hit the NEP’s own target of 50 percent GER by 2035; at the current pace of institution-building, that target looks out of reach. India has fewer than 1,400 registered universities today, expanding at a rate that will not double, let alone nearly triple, in time.

The other pillar, told through the same numbers

Education rarely gets discussed alongside its natural twin, but the comparison is instructive precisely because it shows the pattern is not confined to schools and colleges. India’s public health spending has hovered around 1.9 to 2 percent of GDP for years, still short of the National Health Policy’s own 2.5 percent target that was supposed to be met by 2025. The global benchmark the World Health Organization points to for universal health coverage is 5 percent; the worldwide average is closer to 6.7 percent. Union government health spending as a share of GDP has actually fallen in recent budgets even as state governments have picked up more of the load — a near-exact echo of what is happening with education, where rupee totals rise while their share of national output and of the total budget quietly slips.

Put the two pillars side by side and a single story emerges, not of neglect exactly, but of a state that keeps announcing bigger numbers while the underlying commitment — measured against the size of the economy and the scale of need — stays roughly where it always was.

So, is something wrong?

Depending on which slice of data you hold up, you can tell two honest but very different stories about Indian education. One is a story of undeniable movement: more teachers, better pupil-teacher ratios, falling dropout rates, rising rural learning scores, a school system now generating one of the largest integrated education databases anywhere in the world through UDISE+. The other is a story of a system that still asks millions of families to gamble their child’s future on an exam whose integrity keeps failing, that has never come close to the funding levels its own commissions recommended sixty years ago, and where a majority of ten-year-olds still cannot read a book meant for eight-year-olds.

Both stories are true at once. That is, in fact, the most accurate way to describe where Indian education stands in 2026 — not collapsing, not thriving, but a system whose gains keep getting undercut by the parts nobody has fixed for decades: chronic underfunding relative to ambition, an examination architecture that has not scaled with demand, and a persistent gap between what the national average shows and what a child in an under-resourced district actually experiences.

Wangchuk’s hunger strike will end, one way or another, and the news cycle will move to something else. The data underneath it will still be there, largely unchanged, waiting for whoever is willing to look at it honestly — not as a political weapon, but as an unfinished national project that both major pillars of any developing country, education and health, still deserve.

Sources: UDISE+ 2025-26 Report (Ministry of Education);ASER 2024 (Pratham/ASER Centre); Economic Survey 2024-25 and 2025-26; Union Budget documents 2026-27; Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education reports; NITI Aayog statements on higher education; National Health Policy 2017 and WHO benchmarks on health financing;