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Every year on September 5th, India stops for a moment to honor Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher, the president, the reason we celebrate Teachers’ Day. Schools throw together programs. Students make cards. A few newspaper columns appear, praising teaching like it’s a sacred calling. And then, just as quickly, the fanfare fades. The conversation goes right back to headaches about roads, technology, the economy, everything, it seems, except those quiet classrooms at the heart of it all.
Here’s what we miss, year after year: every goal India sets for itself—better doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, leans entirely on teachers. But somehow, the people most responsible for shaping all this talent rarely get much real recognition. Watch what happens when a student cracks a tough medical exam, there’s an avalanche of celebration: interviews, garlands, inspiration stories in the local paper. The teacher who spent years working with that kid, perhaps in an overcrowded government school, with leaky roofs and spotty chalk supplies? Barely a mention. It’s a gap that says a lot about how India really values teachers compared to what it says about them on Teachers’ Day.
Let’s look closer at what we’re actually asking of Indian teachers. In government schools, teachers often face classrooms twice or three times as big as what any policy says is reasonable. They juggle students with wildly different abilities, in different grades, and often swap between multiple subjects, even when their own training’s been patchy. And that’s just inside the school walls. Many are pulled away for census duties, election work, or other odd government tasks that eat up classroom time. Sure, the Right to Education Act sets down rules for class sizes and facilities, but in a lot of rural and small-town schools, those rules seem like wishful thinking.
Now, if you talk about places like Jammu and Kashmir, a teacher’s burden gets even heavier. Years of school closures, first from unrest, then from Covid, mean these teachers have had to squeeze lost months and years into crammed lessons just to keep kids from falling behind the rest of the country. When you hear about some village kid from Kashmir acing the NEET or the JEE against all odds, people cheer, and they should. But hardly anyone remembers the teacher who kept things afloat during all those shutdowns.
Then there’s the private tuition boom. All across India’s towns and cities, parents are shelling out big money for coaching centers and tutors. Every rupee spent there is, in a way, a quiet vote of no confidence in how schools are working. It’s not that teachers in schools don’t care; many of them are burning themselves out doing their best. The problem is a broken system—one where the training, pay, and work conditions just don’t measure up to what’s actually asked of teachers.
Speaking of pay, what you earn as a teacher in India depends hugely on where you land. If you’re lucky enough to work in a big private school or a central government job, you might have a stable salary, some perks, maybe even chances for training. But a lot of teachers work on contract for state governments, often for a fraction of the pay, with little job security and almost no access to resources. This kind of divide within a profession is hard to square with the “nation builder” speeches people love to give in September. Nice words and thank-you cards don’t pay the bills.
Still, you can’t deny that, deep down, Indian culture places teachers on a high pedestal. The guru-shishya tradition shows up everywhere, from Sanskrit verses that call the teacher godlike, to former students touching teachers’ feet decades after graduation. Alumni groups often organize big gatherings to honor their teachers, and there are plenty of stories about ex-students tracking down their mentors and even funding scholarships in their names. That bond between student and teacher runs deep, even when the rest of the system can’t keep up
The National Education Policy of 2020 said all the right things: teacher quality and working conditions matter, and we need better training, recruitment, ongoing development. But policy is one thing; making it real, on the ground, is another. Some states are stepping up, investing in teacher training and support. Others—well, not so much.
The phrase “nation builder” gets tossed around a lot in speeches, but it needs to mean something more real. India can’t treat education as the key to progress while treating teachers as an afterthought—either in budget meetings or in priorities. If you really want to measure respect for teachers, don’t look at the Teachers’ Day parties. Look at what happens in classrooms, at the paychecks, at the real-life dignity and support these people receive every other day of the year. That’s where the story really gets told.
mdmuslimbhat@gmail.com
