Experience  ·  §5 New Delhi  ·  June 2025
Government of India · Ministry of Education · File

Policy Intern

Ministry of Education, Government of India

Office of Mr. Rahul Pachori, Director

16 June – 30 June 2025  ·  New Delhi

Abstract

A two-week placement at India's apex education ministry, working under a Director on the Samagra Shiksha Scheme, the government's flagship integrated school education programme. The internship involved internal policy analysis, scrutiny of financial architecture, and budget-level work at the intersection of public finance and education reform under NEP 2020.

Institution·Ministry of Education, GoI Supervisor·Mr. Rahul Pachori, Director Duration·16 – 30 June 2025 Document·Letter of Internship ↗
§1 Context

The Samagra Shiksha Scheme is the Government of India's integrated framework for school education, spanning pre-primary through class XII, designed to ensure equitable access, quality, and governance across the country's 1.5 million schools. It consolidates the earlier Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, and Teacher Education programmes into a single administrative architecture aligned with the National Education Policy 2020.

The internship placed me within the Office of Mr. Rahul Pachori, Director at the Ministry, during a period of active budget planning and utilisation review. The work was internal, touching live policy documents, fund-flow records, and expenditure data, which made this an unusually substantive placement for a high school student.

§2 Contributions
Key Tasks
(i) Contributed to internal policy analysis on the Samagra Shiksha Scheme, reviewing its financial architecture and how fund allocation maps onto NEP 2020 priorities at the school level.
(ii) Examined fund-flow mechanisms and expenditure patterns across states, identifying structural patterns in how central allocations are drawn down and utilised.
(iii) Assisted in budget utilisation reviews, tracing the gap between approved allocations and actual expenditure across programme components.
(iv) Identified potential opportunities for fiscal efficiency in school education, producing observations that fed into internal planning discussions.
(v) Supported the preparation of insights to strengthen national planning and support frameworks under the integrated scheme structure.
§3 Reflection

What made this internship unusual was the level of access. Reading internal budget documents is different from reading policy papers, the gap between the stated ambition of a scheme and the granular reality of its fund flows is where real understanding of governance lives. Working inside that gap, even briefly, shifted how I think about the relationship between policy design and public finance.

Grateful to Mr. Rahul Pachori and the team for their guidance. I left with a sharper sense of how evidence-based policymaking operates at the federal level, and a clearer view of where the interesting problems in Indian education finance actually are.

Letter of Internship ↗ ← Back to Experience