Neutrality, Not-for-Profit Status, and Policy Profit Reframe Education in India

• In Event: Scale, status, and expansion: Cultural-historical studies of education and democracy in South Asia

Proposal

At a time when education is increasingly invoked as a solution to social division, peace and global inequity, non-profit organizations have assumed a central role in shaping policy agendas. In India, organizations like Pratham Education Foundation and Teach for India (TFI) present themselves as apolitical, not-for-profit actors committed to equity and innovation. Yet this “neutrality” masks a deeper alignment with neoliberal logics of privatization: educational problems are reframed as technical deficits in learning and teaching, a deficit-based approach, while sidelining systemic issues which cause such problems. This paper theorizes this organizational dynamic as the pursuit for policy profit- the accumulation of agenda access, institutional embedding, knowledge legitimacy, and symbolic capital that secures long-term influence over public policy.

Pratham’s flagship interventions illustrate this dynamic. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a national-level - household based survey that Pratham facilitated annually since 2005 until 2015 and ever since alternate years, has been useful in providing a snapshot of potential learning challenges in rural India. Framing it as system monitoring, through ASER, Pratham has flattened the problem of schooling into a “learning crisis” measurable only in terms of foundational literacy and numeracy. Building on ASER’s framing, Pratham’s other flagship intervention, the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) further narrows the problem definition, constructing the “solution” as basic skills instruction centered on letter recognition, word and sentence reading for reading and literacy, and number recognition and simple mathematical operations for numeracy. By framing the intervention as simple, efficient and cost-effective, typically lasting about 30-45 days (Banerjee et al., 2016), TaRL has been widely scaled through state partnerships in India and in several global south countries like Nigeria (Empowering Learning Africa, 2024) , Botswana (Wyss et al., n.d.), etc. TaRL’s focus forecloses broader educational aims- critical thinking, democratic participation and citizenship- essential to peacebuilding in a divided society. Yet, Pratham has successfully embedded its approach within national policies such as NIPUN Bharat and NEP 2020 (Jhingran, 2025; Kukreja, 2024; Kumar & Banerji, 2024), accumulating policy profit in the form of agenda setting power, institutional embedding, and symbolic legitimacy.

Teach for India (TFI), an off-shoot of Teach for America, contrastingly operates on a different pathway: a fellowship program that recruits graduates and early-career professionals, provides them a short (5-6 weeks) pre-service training, and places them in under-resourced schools in urban locations like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc. However, unlike Teach for America, which requires formal teaching certification, TFI, as stated on their website (Teach For India, n.d.), demands no prior teaching experience or training. This minimal preparation risks devaluing teaching as a profession and disconnects Fellows’ pedagogical training from the everyday structural realities of Indian government schools. At the same time, TFI frames its mission in terms of leadership development, positioning Fellows as future changemakers rather than career educators. Through alumni networks, municipal partnerships, and media visibility, TFI secures symbolic and institutional capital that expands its role in governance (FP Studio, 2019; Subramanian, 2018). Its neutrality and nonprofit identity enable it to enter policymaking spaces without being perceived as politically or financially motivated. The result is another form of policy profit: sustained influence over educational agendas despite limited engagement with systemic inequities.

Grounded in market sociology (Verger et al., 2020), policy mobility (Ball, 2016), and policy transfer (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012), this paper introduces the novel theory of policy profit, as a form of non-financial return. Unlike the typical understanding of profits within market-reforms, this paper looks at a new form of public-private partnership (PPP), where the private entity does not seek financial gains (at least not directly), instead the return is having a seat at designing and shaping educational policy. Policy profit comprises of four dimensions: (1) agenda access (shaping how educational problems are defined); (2) knowledge legitimacy (producing evidence and narratives that accords epistemic authority); (3) institutional embedding (formalizing practices through partnerships with state governments, municipal agencies, global organizations etc.); and (4) symbolic capital (leveraging media visibility, alumni prestige, donor endorsements). While these dimensions have been individually documented in literature, this paper synthesizes them to a coherent analytical framework.

Methodologically, the paper relies on critical content analysis of organizational resources (annual reports, websites, program guides, policy briefs) and government documents (NEP 2020, NIPUN Bharat guidelines), complemented by process tracing of two pathways: (a) Pratham’s ASER → TaRL → NEP/NIPUN policy integration; and (b) TFI’s fellowship → municipal partnerships → alumni advisory roles. Together, these case studies illuminate how neutrality and not-for-profit status are mobilized to reshape public education agendas toward privatized, technocratic forms of governance.

Theoretically, this paper extends debates on privatization by showing how not-for-profit actors benefit from participation in public policy not through financial gain but through durable symbolic and institutional returns. Empirically, it demonstrates how Pratham and TFI’s claims of neutrality obscure their role in privatizing educational agendas—by narrowing visions of learning to measurable skills, devaluing teaching as a profession, and sidelining structural determinants of inequality. Normatively, it argues that such reframing weakens education’s capacity to serve as a vehicle for peace and justice, particularly in contexts like India where divisions of caste, class, and gender profoundly shape educational access.

This paper situates itself within CIES 2026 theme, Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World, by highlighting through the cases of Pratham and TFI, how global neoliberal reforms reconfigure public education, not by over privatization, but by transforming learning and teaching into narrow, technical problems, solvable through simple cost-effective solutions. Such positioning can paradoxically exacerbate division rather than foster cohesion. This emerging PPP model—where financial profit is replaced by policy profit—demands sharper scrutiny if equity and democratic values are to remain central to education.

Author

• Steffi Elizabeth Thomas, Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) - Bloomington, IN