Every morning long before the school bill rings, Dhuniram* walks through the dusty lens of his village in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. A second-generation government school teacher, he stops at the homes of the children who haven't shown up at school for weeks, offering a smile or a gentle nudge.

Sometimes he just sits with the mother or the grandmother in the verandah over a cup of tea, to explain why enrolling in school or going to school still matters.

Inside his classroom, he weaves together Bhojpuri, Hindi, Science, Math and English textbooks to make relevant lessons for his students from the. His blackboard is scratched and broken, and he might have to teach children of three different grade levels in the same classroom at the same time.

His eyes are always scanning for the child who is hungry, who is scared, who is struggling.

Most of the time, he is not just a teacher, but a replacement for a parent, a translator of policy, a connector between home and school, a negotiator of hope and truth, a builder of pre-requisite and actual learning, between past performances and future possibilities.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promises to transform learning across the country, but the question is who do we trust to take it into our classrooms?

Teachers like Dhuniram represent the beating heart of this question and so we must revisit a more fundamental question: Who is a teacher in today's India?

According to Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) and the National Economic Survey 2024–25, India’s school system serves 24.8 crore students across 14.72 lakh schools with 98 lakh teachers.

Government schools educate 50% of students and employ 51% of teachers. But teachers are not a uniform group — their realities vary widely in terms of socio-economic background, job security, salary, and working conditions.

Even before entering classrooms, aspiring teachers’ journeys are shaped by market demands, financial pressures, and uneven access to quality education.

The image of teachers in India has long been shaped by power and purpose. From the revered Guru of ancient times to the colonial-era functionary trained to reproduce knowledge, the role of the teacher has swung between autonomy and control.

Post-independence, teachers were envisioned as key to building a democratic nation — but this hope was undercut by underfunded, disconnected teacher education institutions focused more on compliance than creativity.

So, teacher education gradually became a space of delivery rather than dialogue. We have always focused on — ‘how to teach’ — rather than engaging deeply with the what, why, or for whom of teaching.

Our teachers are offered a highly standardised curriculum, but this unified approach not only flattens the diversity but also limits the capacity of teachers to reflect, adapt, and innovate in response to their students’ needs.

NEP 2020 recognised this long-standing gap and called for the development of a four-year integrated programme. This was a significant step but structure alone cannot shift the soul of teacher education.

Because the real crisis lies not just in what we train teachers to do — but in how we view them in the first place. If we continue to imagine teachers merely as implementers of curriculum — rather than as thinkers, collaborators, co-creators, and caregivers — reforms will not travel beyond the policy.

Often, teachers enter the classroom with unresolved doubts, internalised hierarchies, and a lack of clarity about their own purpose because their education never allowed them the time to engage with critical questions.

And in India, where caste, gender, language, religion and poverty deeply influence learning, well-meaning pedagogy can still reinforce inequality if teachers are not encouraged to reflect critically on their own positionality and the context of their students.

Without reflection, even progressive methods can fail the most marginalised students. So we need to move beyond training teachers in methods to cultivate them as reflective practitioners. 

So, what does a new imagination of teacher education look like?

First, we must invest in building teacher education institutions that foster spaces of inquiry, not bureaucracy. Institutions must become alive with discussion, debate and secure connections to nearby schools and communities.

Second, teacher education must not be a single point of entry but a lifelong journey. Communities of practice, reflection, and embedded coaching and mentorship must become the norm, and not the exception.

Third, we must shift the cultural imagination of the teacher. Celebrate them, not as heroes burdened with sacrifice, but as skilled professionals, whose insight is critical to shaping an equitable future. In a new India, that is asking the questions about what learning should look like, let us also remember: classrooms don't change unless the people in them do.

Teachers like Dhuniram are already showing us the way — not through grand gestures, but through small, everyday acts of love, justice, and belief in their children.

(Pratyay Malakar is a PhD Scholar and Junior Research Fellow (JRF), School of Education Studies, Ambedkar University, New Delhi. They are also a 2019 Teach For India (TFI) alumna.)

(*name changed to maintain privacy)