Nearly every child in India is now in a classroom. For a country that once struggled to get children through the school gate, that is a real achievement, and it deserves to be named before anything else. Enrolment among children aged 6 to 14 stood at 98.1 percent in 2024, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). The Right to Education Act has largely done what it set out to do. The harder question is the one that begins the moment a child sits down at a desk.

Being in school, it turns out, is not the same as learning in school. The same survey found that fewer than half of Class 5 students in rural India could read a simple Class 2 level text. Many children climb through the grades without the reading and number skills those grades quietly assume. Enrolment counts how many are present. It says nothing about whether a child can think, question, or use what they know. That distance—between sitting in a classroom and acting on what is taught—is the distance between access and agency, and it is where the real work now begins.

Agency is simply the ability to act on one’s own learning. A child who has it can read a form without help, follow an argument, solve a problem that was never in the textbook, and make a decision with some confidence. For children from disadvantaged homes, this is not a soft or secondary skill. It is the factor that decides whether education becomes a genuine way out of poverty or just a certificate that leads nowhere. A young person who can read the words but cannot reason with them is still locked out of the opportunities a knowledge economy is meant to open. The child who can question and adapt moves forward; the child who has only memorised is left waiting.

Part of the reason this gap persists is that the system measures what is easiest to count. Enrolment, attendance, and pass rates fit neatly on a dashboard. Learning, curiosity, and confidence do not. Even technology, so often held up as the great leveler, follows the same pattern. ASER’s data reveals that while roughly nine in ten rural teenagers have access to a smartphone at home, far more reach for it to scroll than to study. A device in a child’s hand, like a seat in a classroom, is access. What the child does with it is agency—and the two are not the same.

Closing that distance requires a shift in how education is delivered on the ground, not just how it is measured. Children learn best when the whole child is supported rather than the syllabus alone. In practice, that means:

• Foundational reading and numeracy first, establishing basic literacy before complex concepts.
• Nutritional security, ensuring a hungry child is physically equipped to concentrate.
• Mentorship for first-generation learners, bridging the support gap for students without academic help at home.
• Pathways to livelihoods, creating an explicit connection between classroom learning and economic self-reliance.

This is not passive charity. An independent KPMG assessment of an education initiative for underprivileged youth demonstrated that every rupee invested created about 3.64 rupees of social value. Building agency is not only essential for the child—it is sound economics.

India has spent two decades getting its children into school, and it should be proud of that. The next two will be judged by something harder to measure and far more important: what those children can actually do once they are there. Enrolment opened the door. Agency is everything that happens after a child walks through it—whether that child learns to read, to think independently, and to build a life with dignity. That is the conversation the country needs to have now.

Views expressed are personal

The author, Kushal Raj Chakravorty, is Founder and Managing Trustee, Lotus Petal foundation

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