Introduction
0.1. Education is a basic ingredient for achieving full human potential. Providing universal access to an education of high quality is the key to India’s continued ascent, progress, and leadership on the global stage–in terms of economic development, social justice and equality,
environmental stewardship, scientific advancement, and cultural preservation. India possesses the highest number of young people of any country entering school over the next decade, and
the extent to which high quality educational opportunities are presented to them will determine the direction of the future of India and its people.
0.2. The world is undergoing rapid changes in the knowledge landscape. With the rise of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, many unskilled jobs worldwide are expected
to be taken over by machines, while the need for skilled labor, particularly involving mathematics, computer science, data science, and deep learning will be in rapidly increasing demand. With increasing pollution and climate change, there will be a sizable shift in how we meet the world’s energy, water, and sanitation needs, again resulting in the need for new skilled
labor, particularly in biology, chemistry, physics, and climate science. There will be a growing. demand for humanities and art, as India moves towards becoming a developed country and. among the three largest economies in the world.