Is Equality an Outdated Concern in Education?

The central government policy of setting up residential schools for the dropout girls in educationally backward blocks through the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya scheme has generally been hailed by educationists. This paper critically examines the scheme and its implementation from the equality and justice perspectives. It argues that the equal educational opportunity doctrine, a state commitment in the 1960s, was abandoned with the National Policy on Education 1986, which resulted in a multilayered, inegalitarian school system for subordinate communities. Are schemes like the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya, which tend to privilege a minuscule number of school dropouts, a subversion of the equality principle, privileging a few over the majority?