Colours, Conversations and Care #TeachersMatter

2020. A year of masks, lockdowns, collapsing certainties. The year classrooms shrank to screens.

Somewhere between the panic and the poor bandwidth, a long, serious document appeared. National Education Policy 2020. ‘Ambitious’. ‘Sweeping’. ‘Transformative’, they said. It did not trend. It did not scream. It waited, like a teacher at the door of a noisy classroom, holding a set of notebooks and a set of unflinching hopes.

The same year, in a small village in Maharashtra, the world turned its spotlight on a government school teacher. Paritewadi was not the kind of place global prizes usually notice. Teenagers married early. Attendance stumbled at the edge of two percent. The language of the textbooks did not match the language of the children. On paper, the school was a statistic, not a story. Yet there was a teacher who learnt the children’s language, translated their books, stitched QR codes into the margins to open secret windows of sound and story. He turned his home into a science lab. He connected his students to children in countries they had only heard of in the news. Ranjitsinh Disale won the Global Teacher Prize in 2020. One million dollars. He gave away half. The sentence he chose was simple, “Sharing is growing.”

What could it mean when grassroots innovation and a transformative policy vision emerge from the same soil?

Fast Forward, February 2026. And it’s happened again.

This time, the spotlight fell on splashes of colour on broken walls. On slums and villages that woke up one morning to find that their dull cement had become murals of alphabets, numbers, planets, hygiene lessons interacting with young hopes and dreams. On an artist who refused to keep art inside galleries, who painted learning onto the skin of neglected buildings and called them "Living Walls of Learning."

850 learning centres. An estimated one million children drawn into the orbit of education by colours, conversations and care. Dropout rates sliced in half in places where dropping out once felt inevitable. Rouble Nagi accepted the same prize in 2026. Again, one million dollars. Again, a story from India.

Two teachers. Two Global Teacher prizes. Six years apart. Both building innovative models. Both demonstrating what's possible when creativity meets commitment. Both showing the world what Indian educators can achieve.
Somewhere between those headlines and that policy lies a quiet, urgent question. How did India become a place where the world’s highest teaching honour lands twice, while daily conversations still treat teaching as a modest, forgettable job?

There is a sentence tucked inside NEP 2020 that is etched in my educator brain: "The respect for and importance of teachers in our society must be restored through systemwide reforms."

Restored. Not created. Restored, as if something precious once held has been misplaced in the rush.

Bharat, our country, has always known the weight of the word ‘guru’. Guru as the one who takes us towards light. “Asato Ma Sadgamaya, Tamaso Ma Jyotirgamaya…". And yet, somewhere between old prayers and today’s pay slips, the idea of the teacher thinned out.

There is the familiar joke about teachers who "work only half a day" and "enjoy so many holidays." There is the sideways glance at teachers at social functions. There is the invisible assumption that the truly talented go elsewhere.
Meanwhile, classrooms continue to fill every morning, facilitated by unsung sheros (for heros are a miniscule minority in this profession)

Yet, ‘to teach is to pause. To listen with eager eyes when silence feels longer than a whole annual plan...

To wait as a thought takes birth— fragile, uncertain, yet alive; while the world screams, "Perform, compete, succeed." All around.
To probe, not to push.
To guide independent ideas

without leaving your own fingerprints.
To build thought, questions and curiosities
within the strict confining impositions of time.
To arrange care like invisible furniture in a room,
so children stand taller without knowing why.
To dramatise, not for effect,
but to let the beauty of that thought turn eternal,
in young memories…’

To teach is to turn a bare classroom into a free, safe haven, a "room of one’s own" in which minds can wander without ridicule. Teaching is a thousand such gestures that rarely find space in policy documents. Yet policies rise or fall on this hidden art. An art that must be treasured, but can rarely be truly measured.

NEP 2020 tries to speak to that art from the outside. It rearranges school years into the 5+3+3+4 structure, attempts to pull early childhood into the fold with play and story, promises mother tongue comfort in the first years of school. It names foundational literacy and numeracy as non-negotiable. It stretches higher education into flexible shapes with credit banks and multiple entry/exits and sprinkles words like "experiential", "multidisciplinary", "holistic" with genuine intent.

None of this feels magical inside a real classroom. It arrives as new training modules, different report formats, changing textbooks, revised timetables. It arrives as one more layer of expectation on a teacher who is already balancing overcrowded classes, administrative duties, leaking roofs and children who bring hunger, fear and resilience to their desks. And yet the numbers matter. Behind each percentage point of literacy lies a child reading a first sentence without stumbling. Behind each rupee in the school education budget lies the possibility of a working toilet, a repaired ceiling, a potentially functional library. Progress sits beside absence. Seventy percent who can read sit beside thirty percent who still cannot. New exemplar schools rise while old buildings elsewhere still wait for paint. This does not make the policy a miracle. It does not make it a failure. It makes it exactly what it was always going to be in a country this complex. A work in progress. A scaffold waiting for human hands.

Those human hands belong, most of all, to teachers. The language of policy calls them "human resources" or "capacity". Reality sees the teacher who gets to school early to sweep a classroom, because the cleaning staff is overburdened and children deserve a space that smells of chalk, not sewage. There is the teacher who buys chart paper with personal money for the fifth time this month. The one who holds back tears in the staffroom because a student has dropped out to work yet again! There is the teacher who sees a learner more clearly than that learner sees herself; who notices the flinch when maths is mentioned; the teacher remembers to ask the quiet child about their sick grandparent: the teacher who sits after school with the one who has been labelled and refuses to accept that label as destiny.

None of these gestures appear in NIPUN targets or budget speeches. Respect for teachers, cannot be limited to a one-day celebration. It is Oxygen.

Lack of respect is effectively starving a profession. It shows up as salaries that do not match the gravity of the work. It shows up as staffrooms treated as complaints counters instead of professional spaces. It shows up as policies drafted without the voice of practicing teachers in the room. It shows up as conversations in living rooms, where children hear adults dismiss teachers as "only teachers", and slowly internalise the message that those who shape their days are somehow lesser than those who sign their big ‘pay slips’.

Respect, when present, is not sentimental. It is concrete. It appears as a timetable that leaves room for planning and reflection. It appears as professional development that is meaningful rather than token. It appears as parents meeting teachers not only when Progress cards disappoint, but simply to listen and not to judge. It appears as media coverage that sits with the complexity of education instead of reducing it to exam scores or scandals.
NEP 2020 speaks of restoring that respect. The stories of Ranjitsinh and Rouble show what it looks like when individual teachers act as if that respect already exists inside them, whether or not the world recognises it.

The temptation, on hearing such stories, is to place them in the realm of miracle. To say, "They are special." That sentence is comforting, because it excuses the rest of the system from change. If only a few are extraordinary, then ordinary conditions never need to transform. The deeper lesson in these two Global Teacher Prize stories is not that a country must wait for superheroes. It is that the soil is fertile enough for creative, courageous educators to grow. The question is whether the soil will be nourished or depleted.

There is a teacher in a government school in Bihar who is trying theatre games with a mixed-age group because textbooks alone do not hold their attention. There is a teacher in a private school in Bengaluru who is rethinking homework because the children are already drowning in after-school coaching. There is a teacher in a tribal hamlet in Odisha who uses local stories and agricultural cycles to explain science. These teachers may never step onto a global stage. They breathe life into fragments of hope. They perch in the soul as courage, as determination, as the air beneath wings.

Respect is not flattery. It is alignment. It is the world outside the classroom adjusting itself so that this quiet labour of love becomes a little less lonely. Parents who are reading this may remember a teacher from childhood whose voice still echoes when difficult decisions arise. Teachers who are reading this may remember the one student who came back years later to say, "You may not remember, but that one sentence changed everything for me." Policy has uttered the word "respect" on paper. Global Teacher Prizes have shone their brief, bright light. Data has shifted just enough to suggest that change, when nurtured, is possible at scale. The rest is a more intimate work. A school at a time. A staffroom at a time. A dinner table conversation at a time.

Restoring respect to this profession is not a favour to teachers. It is an act of self-respect for a society that claims to value its children. It is about finding our way back to our roots. An education system that finds its way back to respecting teachers will be one that has finally learnt the most impactful lesson.

Every child deserves education that sees them, believes in them, creates possibilities for them. NEP 2020 promises this. The challenge: building it. Not just in policy documents. In classrooms. One child. One teacher. One functioning school at a time. Learning from what works. Adapting what doesn't. Investing consistently. Supporting teachers genuinely. Reducing barriers systematically. Creating opportunities expansively. Are we doing it? Perhaps, imperfectly. Incompletely. Unevenly. But we're doing it. The work continues. The journey is long.

There is only one direction. Forward.

- Dr Amrita