At Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya (ABV), the highlight of the week is the kheer (dessert) served for midday meals on Tuesdays. A government school in Tinki Toli, a fictional, working-class, peri-urban neighbourhood on the outskirts of Delhi, ABV is chronically underfunded, and its students and teachers lack motivation to improve. When the teachers demand that they should at least be provided with a water cooler in the staff room, the school’s principal, Gyaneswar Tripathy (Kay Kay Menon), reallocates the budget for kheer to buy a water cooler. This further disheartens the students, who tell their principal that kheer is the only thing about their school that makes them proud.

ABV is the school at the centre of the eponymous Amazon Prime series, directed by Himank Gaur and released last month. The incident about the kheer is part of its third episode, “Guru Dakshina”, which refers to the ancient tradition of disciples giving their gurus whatever they ask in lieu of their guidance. In ABV, the leader of the gurus, Gyaneswar, knows that most of his students come from working-class families and do not have a promising academic future. However, when he learns that the principals of the ten schools in Delhi with the best performance in the board examination that year will be sent to Cambridge University, he rallies his colleagues and students.

The Hindi series takes a humorous and somewhat cliched, according to some reviewers, look at the rather serious issue of India’s school education. India has one of the largest school education systems in the world, with 1.47 million schools providing education, which is free and compulsory for everyone aged six years to 14 years, to over 240 million students, according to a report published by the government think tank Niti Aayog earlier this year. However, journalist T.K. Rajalakshmi, in an article for the Frontline, points out several disturbing trends in the data, such as a decline in state-run schools and an increase in private institutions, as well as a drop in student enrolment, especially at the lower levels.

Beyond the numerical data, there is also sufficient qualitative data to show that the school experience for most students in India is dismal. Earlier this week, an alarming incident came to light: Thirty-four students at a school in Bihar’s Nalanda district were hospitalised after being mistakenly served detergent powder instead of salt. This might be an isolated incident, and scholars, such as economists Tanika Chakraborty and Rajshri Jayaram in a 2019 paper, have shown that the midday meal programme, enforced across India by the Supreme Court earlier this century, has led to improved learning and nutritional outcomes.

However, the scheme has also been criticised for promoting vegetarianism, an article of faith for the Hindu right, through pseudo-scientific arguments, and discriminating against Dalit cooks. The 2025 Hindi film, ‘Homebound’, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan and selected as India’s official entry for the Academy Awards, depicts a similar incident, where Phool (Shalini Vatsa), a Dalit “bhojanmata”, as the cooks are called, is sacked by her village school when the parents of non-Dalit students refuse to let their wards eat the food she cooks. Beyond food, most government schools also suffer from a lack of infrastructure and facilities, such as benches, laboratories, and at times, even bathrooms or drinking water. India spends 4.1 percent of its gross domestic product on education, which meets UNESCO’s threshold of 4 percent, but falls short of its own National Education Policy recommendation of 6 percent.     

The Hindi series ABV depicts some of these problems, though always through a lens of humour. For instance, the chemistry lab of the school does not have enough equipment, and one of the staff members uses Bunsen burners to make chai for the teachers. The school does not have a playground or a swimming pool, and even its boundary wall is in a bad state. A local politician, Goldy Randhawa (Deven Bhojani), funds some of the school’s requirements, but he extracts a heavy price, demanding that Tripathy should teach the final-year students a pseudo history of his own family. While the school’s students do not perform well enough in the board examination to be among the top ten Delhi schools, they do emerge as the school with the most improved performance.

Films about underdog school students have been popular over the past two decades. Aamir Khan’s directorial venture, ‘Taare Zameen Par’ (2007), spread awareness about learning disabilities such as dyslexia, and ‘Hichki’ (2018), directed by Siddharth P. Malhotra, focussed on a teacher with Tourette’s syndrome. ‘Hindi Medium’ (2017), directed by Saket Chaudhury, critiqued how English continues to be a marker of class in India and how rich people exploit provisions for impoverished students to enter elite institutions. However, ‘Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya’ is distinct from all these films. While in all three films, it is a hero (or heroine) who comes to the rescue of the underdog children, in the Amazon Prime series, it is a team of dedicated teachers who support their students, highlighting the collaborative process of education.

Over the past several months, school students in various states have launched protests, demanding better facilities at their institutions. The pressure group, Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), has also made improving school education and infrastructure their next campaign, #SchoolThikKaro (#FixTheSchool). Visiting schools across the country, CJP campaigners have been highlighting the crumbling infrastructure at most of these institutions. In response, the governments of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, both ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, have banned the entry of “outsiders” to schools. Censorship, however, is surely not the solution to the problems in India’s school education system.