When Maulana Abul Kalam Azad took charge as independent India's first Education Minister in 1947, the country he was asked to educate could barely read. The 1951 Census, the first after Independence, recorded a literacy rate of 18.33 per cent. Among women, the figure stood at 8.86 per cent, which meant fewer than one in ten could read or write.

Azad held the portfolio for more than ten years, until February 2, 1958, three weeks before his death. In that period, the Ministry of Education he led oversaw the opening of India's first Indian Institute of Technology, the formal launch of the University Grants Commission (UGC), the creation of three national academies for the arts and literature, and two national commissions that reviewed university and school education from the ground up.

As India observes National Education Day on November 11, his 138th birth anniversary, many of those institutions are still at work.

A scholar in the education ministry

Azad was born in Mecca on November 11, 1888, and educated largely at home in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, philosophy and mathematics before teaching himself English. By his early twenties he was editing Al-Hilal, an Urdu weekly that the colonial government banned in 1914 for its nationalist politics. He went on to serve as president of the Indian National Congress, first in 1923 and again from 1940 to 1946, and spent years in prison, including the period in Ahmednagar Fort where he wrote letters later published as Ghubar-e-Khatir.

That background shaped how he approached the ministry. Azad did not treat education as a choice between science and the humanities, or between Indian traditions and modern knowledge. He wanted both, and the institutions created during his tenure reflect that range.

He also set out early what he believed the State owed its citizens. Addressing the All India Education Conference on January 16, 1948, he said, "It is a birthright of every individual to receive at least the basic education without which he cannot fully discharge his duties as a citizen." He argued for free and compulsory schooling for children up to 14, for more opportunities for girls, for vocational training and for teaching in the mother tongue at the primary level.

The Constitution, adopted two years later, set a similar goal in its Directive Principles, asking the State to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to 14 within ten years. That deadline passed unmet. The right was made legally enforceable only through the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act in 2009, more than five decades after Azad's death.

Commissions that set the agenda

Before new institutions could be built, the government needed a clear picture of what it had inherited. Azad used the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), a body dating to 1920, as a forum for this. He presided over its meetings for most of his tenure.

The first major review covered universities. The University Education Commission, set up in 1948 under the chairmanship of philosopher Dr S Radhakrishnan, examined the state of higher education and recommended, among other things, a central body to fund and coordinate universities. That recommendation would later shape the UGC.

Schools came next. At its January 1948 meeting, CABE had called for a commission to examine secondary education, and it repeated the demand in later years. The government appointed the Secondary Education Commission on September 23, 1952, and Azad inaugurated it in New Delhi on October 6 that year. It was chaired by Dr A Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras, and is still widely known as the Mudaliar Commission.

Its 1953 report proposed diversified courses at the higher secondary level, greater attention to vocational and technical streams, the use of regional languages as the medium of instruction, and reforms to the examination system. Several of these ideas recur in later policy documents, including the Kothari Commission report of 1966 and the National Education Policy of 2020.

IIT Kharagpur and the Hijli camp

The most visible institution from the Azad years stands on a site with a difficult history. In 1946, a committee headed by N R Sarkar recommended a set of higher technical institutes across the country, modelled on leading engineering schools abroad, to supply the engineers an industrialising India would need.

The first of these began functioning in May 1950 at Hijli, near Kharagpur in West Bengal, in the buildings of a former British detention camp. On September 16, 1931, police had opened fire inside that camp, killing two unarmed detainees, Santosh Kumar Mitra and Tarakeswar Sengupta. The shooting drew protests from Rabindranath Tagore, and Subhas Chandra Bose travelled to Hijli to collect the bodies.

Azad formally inaugurated the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, on August 18, 1951. In 1956, Parliament passed an Act declaring it an Institution of National Importance, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at its first convocation that year about the transformation of the detention camp into a centre of learning. The old administrative building, now called Shaheed Bhavan, houses the institute's Nehru Museum of Science and Technology.

IIT Kharagpur became the template for the institutes that followed in Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Delhi, and later for the larger network that exists today.

The University Grants Commission

The UGC predates Independence in name. A University Grants Committee was formed in 1945 to oversee the three central universities of Aligarh, Banaras and Delhi, and its remit was widened after 1947. Following the Radhakrishnan Commission's recommendations, the government decided to reconstitute it as a national body.

Azad formally inaugurated the University Grants Commission on December 28, 1953. It was given statutory status under the UGC Act in November 1956, with two clear functions: to coordinate and maintain standards in university education, and to disburse grants to universities.

Seventy years on, that arrangement is under review. The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) Bill, 2025, introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 15, 2025, proposes a single higher education regulator to replace the UGC, the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council for Teacher Education. The proposed body would have separate councils for regulation, accreditation and academic standards, but, unlike the UGC, it would not control funding.

The Bill was referred to a 31-member Joint Parliamentary Committee the following day. Several States and universities have raised concerns about centralisation and institutional autonomy, and the committee's report had not been presented by the end of the Monsoon Session in August 2026. The government maintains that a single regulator will reduce overlapping approvals and bring the system in line with the National Education Policy 2020.

Three academies for the arts and letters

Azad's ministry also handled culture, and his tenure produced the three national academies that still anchor public support for the arts. Their creation followed recommendations from a series of national conferences organised by the government.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi, for music, dance and drama, was created by a resolution of the Ministry of Education dated May 31, 1952. President Rajendra Prasad inaugurated it on January 28, 1953, at a special function in Parliament House. It was the first of the three to begin work.

The Sahitya Akademi, the national academy of letters, was constituted through a ministry resolution dated December 15, 1952, and formally inaugurated on March 12, 1954, in the Central Hall of Parliament, where Azad delivered the welcome address. Its first General Council included Azad himself, Radhakrishnan and C Rajagopalachari, and was chaired by Nehru. The government took care to state that Nehru had been chosen as a writer and author, not as Prime Minister, a distinction meant to protect the academy's independence. Its logo was designed by Satyajit Ray.

The Lalit Kala Akademi, for painting, sculpture and the visual arts, was inaugurated by Azad on August 5, 1954.

All three were set up as autonomous bodies, and they share a home at Rabindra Bhawan in New Delhi. Between them, they run India's best-known awards for writers and artists, maintain archives, and publish and translate work across the country's languages.

Culture as diplomacy

Even before the academies, Azad founded the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) on April 9, 1950, and served as its first president. Its purpose was to build cultural ties between India and other countries through exchanges, scholarships, exhibitions and performances.

The council's headquarters in New Delhi is named Azad Bhawan. It continues to bring international students to Indian universities, supports chairs of Indian studies abroad and sends Indian performers overseas, functions that are now often described as soft power.

How the day came to be

National Education Day is a relatively recent observance. On September 11, 2008, the then Ministry of Human Resource Development announced that Azad's birthday would be commemorated every year as National Education Day, without being declared a holiday. The first observance was held on November 11, 2008. Schools and colleges mark it with seminars, essay competitions and talks on his work. Azad was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1992.

What remains

The distance between 1951 and today is measurable. India's literacy rate rose from 18.33 per cent in 1951 to 74.04 per cent in the 2011 Census, and female literacy climbed from under nine per cent to more than 65 per cent. The gaps Azad worried about have narrowed but not closed: between men and women, between villages and cities, and between States.

The institutional structure he helped put in place has proved durable. IITs remain the country's most sought-after engineering schools, the academies continue to honour writers and artists every year, and the ICCR still carries Indian culture abroad. The UGC, the body he inaugurated in 1953, may soon give way to a new regulator, which makes this National Education Day a useful moment to recall why it was created and what it was meant to do.

Azad's own view was that education had to serve both the individual and the nation, and that a country building factories and laboratories also needed to fund poets, musicians and painters. Many of the institutions that carried that idea forward were opened during his ten years in office.