Digital Education News | Expert Analysis and Commentary - Edinbox Editorial

For decades, universities—particularly in the Global South—have been locked in a race that’s less about learning and more about labels. The chase for “world-class” status, dictated by Western ranking systems, has turned education into a numbers game. Citations, faculty–student ratios, and international visibility have become the currency of prestige. But what happens when the pursuit of prestige eclipses the purpose of education itself?

Enter Comprehensive Excellence—a transformative framework that promises to restore education’s lost soul. Conceived within the 10Square Model, it rejects the tyranny of metrics and replaces it with a philosophy that values people over parameters, and purpose over performance.

Redefining the Meaning of ‘Excellence’

Comprehensive Excellence doesn’t just stretch the definition of success—it rewrites it entirely. It envisions universities as ecosystems that cultivate intellect, empathy, resilience, and innovation across ten interconnected dimensions—from ethical leadership and emotional intelligence to social engagement and lifelong learning.

Unlike conventional models borrowed wholesale from the West, this approach is rooted in local realities. It acknowledges that the Global South doesn’t need to mimic Ivy Leagues to matter—it needs to humanize its own learning systems.

This model moves beyond traditional liberal arts education—it localizes holistic learning for the Global South, making it a strategy for national development and human capital growth.

The Tyranny of Rankings

Global rankings like QS and Times Higher Education measure what’s easy to quantify, not what’s essential. Teaching quality, mental health, community engagement—none of these find space in their glossy charts. In chasing rank, institutions often forget their role as agents of transformation. They become factories of credentials, not catalysts of change.

Current global ranking systems like QS and Times Higher Education measure what is easy to count—not what truly counts. They reward privilege and prestige over purpose and inclusion.

These frameworks incentivize imitation, not innovation. They push Global South universities to chase superficial indicators instead of investing in teacher training, mental health, or community linkages—creating institutions that may look excellent but fail to transform lives.

The Post-Pandemic Imperative

The pandemic only deepened this realization. Universities that prioritized well-being and adaptability survived. Those that didn’t, didn’t. Resilience—not ranking—emerged as the true marker of excellence.

Who Will Lead the Revolution?

Transformation must be led by visionaries who see education not as administration but as a living organism.

• University leaders must abandon compliance culture for trust-based leadership.
• Faculty must evolve into mentors and innovators, not mere content deliverers.
• Students should be treated as co-creators, exploring passions through projects like Organic Learning.
• Industry and community partners must bridge classrooms and real-world laboratories.
• Comprehensive Excellence is not an abstraction—it’s already transforming institutions worldwide.

These examples show that Comprehensive Excellence is not utopian—it is proven, scalable, and globally relevant.

From Idea to Implementation

The 10Square Model doesn’t stop at philosophy—it lays out a practical roadmap: learner-centric curricula, experiential learning, competency-based assessments, and a Dual Transcript System that values both academic and holistic growth.

The model even proposes a Balanced Institutional Scorecard—a new compass for governance that measures not vanity metrics but value metrics: student satisfaction, employability, innovation, and social contribution.

How Can Universities Implement It?

Transformation demands systemic change across curriculum, assessment, and governance. The 10Square Model provides a roadmap through five pillars of reform:

1. Learner-Centric Curriculum

Integration replaces silos through Major–Minor systems and core courses in:

• Design Thinking
• AI & Data Fundamentals
• Financial & Legal Literacy
• Human Rights & Sustainability
  

2. Experiential Learning

Mandatory internships, field projects, and research form the backbone of learning—turning graduates into thinkers who can do and doers who can think.

3. Organic Learning: Passion with Purpose

A year-long independent project allows students to pursue their passion under mentorship—building specialized portfolios and reducing the “brain drain” from developing nations.

4. Multi-Assessment Strategy

Evaluation shifts from rote exams to competency-based multi-stage assessment:

This inclusive approach recognizes diverse talents and reduces inequities of standardized testing.

5. The Comprehensive Excellence Scorecard

To quantify holistic growth, the model introduces a weighted scorecard:

This feeds into a Dual Transcript System—one academic, one holistic—ensuring both cultural acceptance and global recognition.

Overcoming the Old Order

Reform is never easy. The biggest barriers—resources, cultural inertia, and faculty resistance—can’t be wished away. But the model offers evolutionary, not revolutionary, reform. It suggests low-cost, high-impact solutions, from blended learning to peer mentoring. Most crucially, it redefines merit: faculty promotions that reward mentorship and interdisciplinarity alongside research.

The Paradigm Ahead

At its core, Comprehensive Excellence is not just a framework—it’s a movement. One that unfolds across four levels: shaping ethical individuals, nurturing innovative institutions, driving national growth, and redefining global benchmarks.

Comprehensive Excellence is not a reform—it’s a movement that unfolds across four concentric circles:

This evolving cycle ensures that holistic learning → engaged alumni → institutional growth → national development → learner empowerment continues perpetually.

Long-Term Paradigmatic Shift

Comprehensive Excellence transforms education from transactional to transformational, renewing the social contract between universities and society.

In this vision, education is no longer transactional; it is transformational. It shifts focus from grades to growth, silos to synthesis, and elitism to empowerment.

A Humanistic Renaissance

Comprehensive Excellence isn’t anti-modern—it’s post-modern. It’s the next great leap for higher education systems seeking balance between intellect and integrity, innovation and inclusion.

If adopted widely, it could herald a Humanistic Renaissance—a renewal of purpose in universities where success is no longer measured by rank but by relevance.

The real question for policymakers and educators is not if this paradigm will take hold, but when. Because in the decades ahead, the institutions that survive will not be the most ranked—but the most human.

When the career paths were charted, print journalists wrote the country's first draft of history, broadcasters brought the globe into homes, and advertising creatives shaped culture through jingles, there was a time. Now, those so-safely trodden ways are disappearing fast. The media industry, once a mirror of power and stability, stands on shaky ground. Digital disruption, Artificial Intelligence, declining public trust, and crumbling business models have turned the profession on its head. And most media education in India still looks eerily the same as it did two decades ago.

The truth is painful but inevitable — Indian media education is out of date, disjointed, and perilously out of touch with reality. Unless colleges carry on using outdated textbooks and serial models of communication, they will be sending out young graduates unprepared for an industry already operating on data, algorithms, and crisis of credibility. The times require a new type of media professional: one who is flexible, moral, multi-tasking, and technologically skilled.

Then comes unlearning. The previous system was for the era when newspapers were the sole thing and Doordarshan dictated the national agenda. Advertising during that time meant full-page advertisements, and public relations meant faxed press releases. The course was tuned to that static reality — in tidy boxes of "Print Journalism," "Radio Production," or "Television Editing."

But that siloed paradigm doesn't exist anymore. News gets released first on X (formerly Twitter), gets amplified through rapid videos on Instagram, and analyzed on podcasts or YouTube in hours. Audiences no longer sit back to watch — they participate, ask, and create. But yet, our students are being taught to work for yesterday's newsroom, not the digital environment of tomorrow.

A 2025 course titled Print Media-I is not just old-fashioned; it's deceptive. It prepares students for a diminishing world, one in which print incomes have fallen off a cliff and linear television commercials have reached their peak. In its 2024 report, FICCI-EY had said digital media incomes overtook TV for the first time at INR 802 billion. That transformation isn't merely financial; it's societal. It is the beginning of a new order of information wherein attention of the audience, and not airtime, becomes the benchmark of worth.

To go on teaching print-focused curricula is to mislead young ambitions to acquire skills for a labor market that no longer exists — or exists in much smaller numbers. Universities need to see that the economy of the media has shifted online and with it the meaning of narrative, of promotion, and of credibility itself.

Artificial Intelligence hasn't merely automated the tasks — it's disrupted the value proposition of skills in every news desk and communications agency. AI can now produce first-cut drafts of reports, edit out video, create ad campaigns, and even monitor audience behavior patterns in real time. What it can't do, though, is replace human judgment — the skill to balance ethics, subtlety, and compassion.

It is exactly here that future media professionals need to carve their niche — not as replacement machines but as complements. Rather than teaching students how to carry out mechanical functions such as writing copy or building press lists, media schools should equip them to be strategists, analysts, and ethical decision-makers.

AI literacy needs to be as basic as language literacy. Not just how to operate AI tools but how to audit them — how to recognize bias, check facts, and run it through ethical filters. Technology-enabling journalism must remain grounded in human conscience. Tomorrow's newsroom will require editors who can navigate AI workflows and yet ask the most human question of all: "Is this true?"

The Crisis of Credibility

The issue isn't technological — it's ethical. Along the way, Indian media sacrificed most of its ethics. Clicks have become more significant than searching for the truth, and sensationalism has triumphed over content. It's not a crisis of reputation — it's a crisis of existence.

Audiences today are educated and jaded. They view vast amounts of content but trust little of it. That disillusion is why even the most popular online media struggle to monetize traffic with paid subscriptions. People simply will not pay for anything they do not believe.

For teachers of media, what this implies is that ethics cannot be anymore an option paper in the third semester. It has to be built as the foundation of the curriculum. Verification, transparency, and accountability have to be taught not as ethical values but as survival skills.

Future journalists will have to learn how to authenticate online evidence, detect deepfakes, and verify sources with forensic accuracy. Fact-checking and good AI policy have to be built into every assignment, every production pipeline, and every classroom conversation. Because without trustworthiness, no technology and design magic can salvage journalism.

The Acceleration Gap

As the industry grows at a breakneck pace, academia lags. The "acceleration gap" between education and the imperative has rendered thousands of graduates jobless. The India Skills Report 2024 was a chilling wake-up call: less than half of the young job seekers have skills that match prevailing market requirements.

In education for the media, this conflict is even more compelling. Colleges prefer memorization to creativity. Students are able to recite communication theory but are unable to create a digital campaign or decipher analytics dashboards. They are able to analyze 1980s-style newsroom ethics but are stumped when it comes to moderating disinformation on social media.

In order to fill the gap, Project-Based Learning (PBL) will have to displace rote learning. There should be less class time spent listening to lectures and more spent building — operating live campaigns, creating podcasts, authoring news apps, or starting up micro-media ventures. Experience of the world in the form of structured, credit-bearing industry projects must become the rule, not the exception.

Additionally, Industry-University Collaboration (IUC) needs to be institutional, not accidental. Media companies, start-ups, and communication firms' experts need to co-design and co-teach classes. Universities need to cease perceiving the industry as unknowns and convert them into co-creators of learning.

The New Media Professional: T-Shaped and Human-Centered

The future belongs to T-shaped professionals — broad, cross-platform skills (the horizontal bar of the T) and deep knowledge of a single or double specialty (the vertical stem). A student of the media must not only understand how to write or shoot but how to read audience measurement, how to optimize digital distribution, and how to build revenue models.

This emergent professional identity requires a radical transformation of media curricula. Silos of the past — Print, Radio, TV, Advertising, PR — need to be replaced by interlinked courses in Convergence, Digital Monetization, and Strategic Communication. Undergraduate education needs to stress storytelling across platforms — text, video, podcast, data visualization — and connect every creative exercise with its business result.

Postgraduate specialization needs to extend deeper into computational journalism, strategic media entrepreneurship, and AI-enabled communication. Graduates should graduate not as job seekers but as innovators who can create their own media enterprises.

And as technology becomes more adept at handling mundane work, the uniquely human capabilities — empathy, critical thinking, creativity, and moral judgment — are the true differentiators. Media literacy should focus on these H-skills, which teach students to think critically, hear with heart, and make well-informed decisions.

Reinventing the Classroom

That change won't happen by tweaking trivial courses or rebranded electives. We must transform how we teach. Classrooms must become newsrooms, studios, and incubators. Evaluation must be based on impact and creativity, not theoretical memorization.

Instructor training is imperative. Teachers have been trained in the pre-digital age and have not been retrained to educate students on AI, analytics, or cross-platform content creation. Compulsory continuous professional development (CPD) is a requirement. Teachers are not only required to teach but should mentor and work together with students on real projects.

Infrastructure must also be revitalized. The availability of broadband internet connectivity, production software, and data visualization packages is the bare minimum facilities, not the luxury of a few select institutions. Both the government and the private sector can play an important role in making such availability feasible.

Building a Sustainable Future

The new media landscape is risky but a rich one. With declining traditional ad revenue, the business has had to innovate with new models — membership programs, crowdfunding, native advertising, and individuals engaging. Media studies need to teach students about the economics of the new systems.

The students must be taught how to think entrepreneurially and locate market niches, and construct sustainable media products around them. Teaching in audience economics, content monetization, and startups can no longer be voluntary; it is a survival skill.

Most importantly, the curriculum needs to foster ethical entrepreneurship — creating spaces that prioritize truth, inclusion, and public dialogue over salaciousness. Because the future of media will not only be about who arrives first, but who arrives with a conscience.

From Instruction to Incubation

India's media teachers have a bleak option: adapt or perish. The NEP 2020 provides a policy rationale for interdisciplinarity and flexibility — but needs to be supported by more than paperwork.

Media schools need to shift from being teaching colleges to innovation incubators. They need to gear students towards a global landscape where the half-life of skills is not more than five years and lifelong learning is the only perennial.

If done properly, this reform has the potential to produce a new generation of communicators who are both technically competent and ethical — storytellers who can work alongside AI tools without sacrificing the human touch, brand builders who can establish brands without sacrificing truth, and journalists who restore the people's trust where they have lost it.

Indian media education stands poised on the edge of being remade. The question today is not whether it should be altered — but whether it can alter swiftly enough. The future of the craft, and indeed the health of our democracy, very well may hang in the balance of how we respond to that query.

That’s the no-man’s land many graduates of the COVID years find themselves in—left behind by a world that has seemingly moved on. While the rest of the country debates moon missions and startup booms, there exists a silent generation still stuck at the starting line, scouring LinkedIn for entry-level jobs that no longer exist, and falling prey to an exploitative ecosystem thriving on false hope.

During the pandemic, college placements vanished overnight. Offer letters were revoked. Careers that had barely begun came to a halt. And now, nearly half a decade later, what remains is a gaping hole—one that private training and placement institutes have rushed in to fill. These aren’t your standard coaching centres. They operate in the grey—promising plum tech jobs, experience certificates, and quick-fix career makeovers, all for a fee and your original degree certificates as collateral.

Rohan (name changed), a B.Tech graduate from Jamshedpur after completing his industrial training with Tata Motors led nowhere after the pandemic. By 2023, approaching 30 and still unemployed, he turned to five such institutes in Chennai. They dangled backend developer roles in top firms with ₹16 LPA salaries. All he had to do was pay ₹1.2 lakh upfront—and hand over his original certificates. Today, he’s still chasing interviews, unpaid internships, and living in fear of HR audits. His documents? Locked away in an office drawer.

Then there’s Pooja, a young mother from Hyderabad with a BCA degree. After a two-year career break, she was told she’d never be considered unless she “fixed the gap.” An institute “rebranded” her—rewrote her resume, coached her, fabricated her experience timeline. She’s employed now, but lives under constant anxiety.

The worst-hit are those who neither fit the mould of a fresher nor the comfort of experience. One electrical engineer, now 31, travelled south for a job training program—only to end up depressed, isolated, and betrayed. “I had dengue, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t talk to anyone due to language. I kept asking about my placement—they finally said, ‘We only train, we don’t guarantee jobs.’”

And yet, the price tags are all too real:

• ₹20,000 for admission
• ₹50,000 per interview (after an offer letter)
• ₹1 lakh for an “experience certificate”
• Another ₹1 lakh post-placement as “success fees”

The institutes don’t sign contracts. They communicate through vague promises. “Placement depends on the candidate,” one helpdesk executive told me, conveniently avoiding any written assurance.

This isn’t a one-off scam. It’s a systemic rot. A survival economy built on the backs of pandemic graduates too desperate to question, too exhausted to resist. What should have been a temporary setback has become a career death sentence for many—unless, of course, they pay.

Where are the regulators? Where are the safeguards? Why is it so easy to open an institute that takes degrees hostage in the name of employability?

COVID-era graduates don’t need fabricated resumes or illegal shortcuts. They need bridges back into the workforce. They need structured returnship programs, flexible apprenticeships, re-skilling pathways, and, most importantly, recognition from the system that they failed—and still are.

Until then, these shadow networks will thrive. Not because they’re invisible. But because we’ve chosen to look away.

Bio: Nibedita is an independent journalist honoured by the Government of India for her contributions to defence journalism.She has been an Accredited Defence Journalist since 2018, certified by the Ministry of Defence, Government of India.  With over 15 years of experience in print and digital media, she has extensively covered rural India, healthcare, education, and women’s issues. Her in-depth reporting has earned her an award from the Government of Goa back to back in 2018 and 2019. Nibedita’s work has been featured in leading national and international publications such as The Jerusalem Post, Down To Earth, Alt News, Sakal Times, and others.

There’s a popular adage - “Fast, cheap, good—pick two.” Pursue all three, and you risk collapse. Now, transpose that logic to the Indian development model, and a similarly impossible triangle emerges—except this one decides the future of half the population.

In India’s case, the three corners are female labour force participation (FLFP), care infrastructure, and demographic stability. Strengthen one, and the other two teeter. Ignore one, and the whole structure falters. It’s not just a policy dilemma—it’s macroeconomics cracking under a gendered fault line.

The Numbers Show Growth. The Reality Reveals Strain.

The spike from 23.3%female labour force participation in 2017–18 to 41.7% in 2023–24 deserves scrutiny, not celebration. Much of the increase comes from rural India, driven by distress, not opportunity. Women are entering informal, unpaid, or subsistence-level work—not careers that empower, but jobs that barely sustain.

Even in urban, formal sectors, the dropout rate is alarming. Nearly 50% of women leave the labor force between ages 30 and 40—just when caregiving needs are highest. Motherhood, care for elderly, and domestic work conflict with career goals. It's not a "choice" when there are no options provided by society. It's quiet surrender.

The Invisible Economy India Refuses to Account For

Unpaid care work continues to be India's invisible engine of households. Millions of women wake up daily to cook, clean, nurse, educate, plan, and keep families together—without contracts, paychecks, or state acknowledgement.

Indian women spend an average of five hours every day on unpaid domestic work; men get through only one. Globally, unpaid care accounts for over 7.5% of India’s GDP—more than we spend on health or education. Yet, it goes uncounted and unsupported.

Without a care economy—affordable childcare, elderly services, domestic help—women are forced out of the paid workforce. Careers end not due to lack of skill or ambition, but because there’s no infrastructure to share the burden.

Falling Fertility and the Price of Aspiration

India’s fertility rate has dipped to 1.9—below the replacement threshold of 2.1. In metros, it’s even lower. Couples are increasingly opting for DINK (Double Income, No Kids) lifestyles. It isn’t a rejection of family—it’s a reflection of systems that make parenthood unaffordable.

There’s little to no institutional support: minimal parental leave, negligible workplace flexibility, and no local childcare access. Fertility is falling not because people don’t want children—but because the cost of raising them is too high, emotionally and economically. This mirrors the demographic crises already battering Japan and South Korea.

We Can’t Patch a Systemic Crisis

India’s efforts, like the Palna Scheme (2,688 creches for ~57,000 children), are symbolic at best. Compare that to France, which spends 2.5% of GDP on childcare, or Sweden’s 480-day paid parental leave model. Even South Korea is now trialing four-day work weeks to ease family stress.

India’s ambition to become a “Viksit Bharat” hinges not only on digitisation or defence—but on how we treat care as infrastructure. Tax credits for caregivers, employer-supported childcare, public-private creche partnerships, and community-based care solutions aren’t luxuries. They are lifelines.

Care Is Not a Private Problem. It’s a Public Priority.

If India wants women to participate in the economy, have children, and lead fulfilled lives, the care economy cannot be an afterthought. It must be front and centre in policy, budgeting, and social reform.

We ask women to rise, but hand them broken ladders. We laud working mothers, but build no scaffolding to hold them up. We want economic growth—but ignore the invisible labour enabling it.

India’s triangle—labour, care, and demography—can become a virtuous cycle. But only if we stop demanding impossible trade-offs from its women. The future won’t be built in boardrooms alone. It begins in kitchens, creches, and caregiving routines we’ve long ignored.

Teaching Children to Travel Before They Literally Start Piling Their Bags

There's an old adage which gets quoted so extensively amongst travelers: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." In a country like India, that book is not merely thick but an encyclopedia of cultures, landscapes, tongues, and tales. But for schoolchildren by the millions, journeys have been the domain of book pages, sepia photographs, and the occasional summer vacation. The Ministry of Tourism, in its recent move, has altered all this. By making itself child-friendly on its Incredible India website, India has, as it were, created an endless classroom where geography, history, and culture become touchable—not recollected facts but to-be-touched.

This is not simply revamping a government portal. It's an unobtrusive revolution in how we think education must be. That we would create things specially for kids—interactive maps, digital stories, quizzes, trivia, and colorful pictures—underscores an awareness that education cannot be lowered to words and chalk. It requires movement, color, questioning, and most importantly, awe. That is precisely what travel offers, albeit virtually.

From Monuments to Memories

Think of how Indian textbooks typically introduce places. The Taj Mahal is presented as a Mughal wonder in marble. Rajasthan forts are categorized under medieval architecture. Kerala backwaters perhaps find a fleeting mention in geography texts on water bodies. They are presented as dead facts without any heart, to be memorized for a test. What the Incredible India website does is present them with a story which gives their heart to them.

A child who comes to the site does not only know that Taj Mahal was built in the 17th century; they are also exposed to Shah Jahan's dream, Yamuna river glimmering its brightness, and the artists' sweat chiseling out its stones. They don't only witness Rajasthan's forts as ruins—instead, they hear the voice of victories attained and the wars fought. The backwaters of Kerala are no longer blue lines on a map; they are waterways lined with houseboats plying down and festivals breaking out.

When children learn this way, they don't just recall the dates but the feelings—a connective emotional bond to heritage, one that textbooks are unable to create.

Education Meets Exploration

The brilliance of the project lies in its timing. Today, in the post-pandemic world, distance learning is no longer an add-on; it's standard for tens of millions of students. Yet, much of it is passive— hearing lectures, reading out of slides, or clicking on MCQs. By combining travel and learning, the Incredible India portal combines a pinch of fun. Games as experiments, smile-wink maps that winkle back, and questionnaires that question incite discovery rather than passive skimming.

It's fully in accord with the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP), which promotes experiential and interdisciplinary study. Travel, of course, is the most interdisciplinary topic there can be—geomorphology, history, anthropology, economics, ecology, even literature are all up for grabs. When the child discovers the Himalayas through the website, he is learning geology, biodiversity, mythology, and mountaineering in entirety. When he visits Varanasi, he feels the coming together of religion, art, town planning, and philosophy. This is exactly the kind of coming together of knowledge that is encouraged in NEP.

Travel as a Civic Teacher

Apart from studies, travel—real or imaginary—learns lessons that no school can teach. It makes them tolerant, respectful of nature and culture, and compassionate. This project exposes them to India's diversity early in life and makes them good students, but good citizens as well. A child who has learned to appreciate the Sundarbans' fragile ecosystem will be worried about global warming by nature. A child who has learned about the Kutch weavers' craft will naturally respect traditional lifestyles.

The Incredible India website thus does more than generate wanderlust; it sows seeds of responsibility. It says to kids: this is your heritage, your country, your duty to protect.

Challenges Ahead

Of course, no editorial ever is without noting omissions. With all its promise, such an on-line site has the potential to be elitist unless it is democratized. Private school children in the urban areas might learn lots, but rural India where the internet hasn't reached yet, what happens there? If mobility is the new teacher, then access needs to be normative. That means not just internet infrastructure but incorporation into school syllabi so that all the kids, irrespective of where they are from, can start this digital journey.

The second problem is depth. The platform can get children to learn about destinations, but will it also get children to think? Will it rise above nice pictures to discuss sustainable tourism, preservation of historic sites, and how tourism affects societies? The responses will tell us whether or not this is still a wishful exhibit case or otherwise a real learning tool.

A Vision Larger Than Tourism

At its essence, though, this project is not necessarily a vision of tourism. It's an acknowledgment that tourism is not necessarily holidays, Instagram selfies, and souvenirs. Tourism is pedagogy—pedagogy of questioning, pedagogy of listening to tales, pedagogy of writing difference. And by doing that with children, India has taken tourism out of being a consumerist luxury commodity but as a pedagogical tool and a nation-building device.

The Road Ahead

With strong leadership, this revolution can transform traveling and learning. Consider school assignments where kids plot travel routes for social studies class. Consider cyber pen-pal programs where students from various states learn about each other's local landmarks. Consider national tests where kids are tested not on memorization but on knowing storytelling heritage. The future is as vast as the nation itself.

In converting travel into the new classroom, India has made a huge leap. But long leaps, like long travels, are an incremental journey. The direction of this movement will be based on how it gets expanded, how it reaches so close, and how it inspires on an ongoing basis.

At least for the time being, here's what's certain: next generation Indians may not have known the nooks and crannies of their own nation, but through Incredible India's website, they will know it, love it, and, perhaps one day, reclaim it. And that's the real alchemy of education by tourism.

In 2014, when the Swachh Bharat Mission was launched, everyone ridiculed it as another slogan, another anniversary on the government calendar. But a decade down the line, the broom has swept away much more than roads—it has swept away the attitude of indifference, lethargy, and the belief that cleanliness is not one's concern. And now that the Limca Book of Records has authenticated it as the world's biggest cleanliness drive, not only has the movement gained legitimacy, but also attained immortality in the pages of history.

What's remarkable about this feat is not really the figures themselves—though they are staggering. Over 100 million toilets were built. Entire villages declared open-defecation free. Cities experimenting with waste segregation and plastic prohibition. These figures add up. But above all is the change in attitude. A child scolding her father for littering, a school teacher organizing children on a cleanliness procession, a neighborhood raising money to fix a broken drain—such little stories hardly get any publicity, yet they are the very beat of Swachh Bharat.

Cleanliness was treated as cosmetic effort for far too long, something done in advance of festivals or VIP visits. The mission defied that assumption, teaching us that sanitation isn't about appearance—it's about equality, health, and dignity. A toilet in a rural home is a woman no longer waiting till dark to use the toilet. A garbage-free street means fewer sick children from infection. A plastic-free school means future generations to develop an instinctive desire to conserve, not contaminate.

The Limca Book of Records award is not just a certificate. It is a reflection held against us, indicating to us that we, the masses, did it. Governments can launch schemes, allocate budgets, and design a campaign. But any cleanliness campaign can never succeed unless people raise the broom—literally and metaphorically. In that context, Swachh Bharat is perhaps India's most democratic movement in the past few years. It is so much the ragpicker's as it is the Prime Minister's who professed it.

Naturally, there are issues. Mountain-high trash dumps still line our cities. Rivers continue to carry untreated sewerage. Behaviour change is unstable, all too likely to be cast aside when convenience is called for. The journey from one campaign to perpetual cultural shift is a long, unfinished one. 

Can we move beyond symbolism and selfies, beyond broom photo-ops, and make cleanliness a part of our habits? Can education systems integrate sanitation awareness as seriously as they integrate mathematics? Can cities create systems that are simpler to obey than to defy? For record books' notice is a privilege. But recognition in our own day-to-days, in the manner in which we live and tend to our world—that is the reward we should seek.

Swachh Bharat is no more limited to a story of toilets and dustbins. It is about reclaiming dignity, health, and pride from our shared spaces. If the Limca Book of Records calls it the world's largest cleanliness drive, we need to make it the longest one as well. Because a clean India is not something we do for others—it is something we owe to ourselves, and to those who follow us.

Bio: Nibedita is an independent journalist honoured by the Government of India for her contributions to defence journalism.She has been an Accredited Defence Journalist since 2018, certified by the Ministry of Defence, Government of India.  With over 15 years of experience in print and digital media, she has extensively covered rural India, healthcare, education, and women’s issues. Her in-depth reporting has earned her an award from the Government of Goa back to back in 2018 and 2019. Nibedita’s work has been featured in leading national and international publications such as The Jerusalem Post, Down To Earth, Alt News, Sakal Times, and others.