India, Aug. 7 -- Dr BR Ambedkar once said. "Examination is something quite different from education, but in the name of raising the standard of education, they are making the examinations so impossible and so severe that the backward communities which have hitherto not had the chance of entering the portals of the university are absolutely kept out."

The progressive shrinking of states' space in education policy did not begin yesterday. It began with the National Policy on Education of 1968, adopted by the Union Government in the wake of the Kothari Commission, which formalised the three-language formula. Even before that policy took full shape, CN Annadurai, then the Tamil Nadu chief minister, spearheaded a historic resolution in the as...