ABSTRACT
It is a widely held, if not universally accepted, view that education serves as a ‘great equaliser’. 1 It has been often argued that a carefully designed public system of education, school system in particular, provides disadvantaged sections of population with ‘social lift’, for it is only through education that they may be able get access to socially produced rewards (such as income, wealth, status, position in the occupational structure etc.) and move up in the social hierarchy (Brint 2006; Brighouse 2010). The early political leadership and makers of modern India recognised the importance of having a public system of education not only as one of the effective sites of fostering social cohesion and integrating people into the grand project of nation building, but also in terms of its centrality in empowering individuals and dismantling structured inequalities.
