India’s National Education Policy 2020: Evidence of Structural Superiority Over Legacy Western Systems

This paper argues that India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 should not be evaluated as a developing nation's attempt to catch up with Western educational institutions. Instead, NEP 2020 represents a second-generation redesign of education systems, built after the structural failures of the Western model became visible. While Western systems remain trapped in path dependencies inherited from the industrial era, NEP 2020 is architecturally designed for a post-industrial world characterized by nonlinear careers, artificial intelligence disruption, and the need for civilizational resilience at scale. Academic literature increasingly recognizes NEP 2020 as a visionary reform with potential to modernize Indian education through holistic development frameworks. This paper examines the latecomer advantage, the contrast between specialist-producing and survivor-producing educational architectures, the embedded reforms that the West cannot replicate, the antifragility of systems designed for Indian scale, the integration of cultural infrastructure into learning, and the native compatibility of NEP's structure with the AI era. The central claim is simple: Western education systems are legacy operating systems being patched for the future; NEP 2020 is a clean-sheet redesign built after the future was already visible.