“Established beyond any debate…”: Foundational literacy and the making of a policy priority in India

Abstract

Amid concerns of a global learning crisis, foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) has become a recent focus area for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). For instance, in 2021, India launched one of the world’s largest initiatives to achieve universal foundational literacy by 2026–27. Given that the term “foundational literacy” was largely absent from earlier policy discourse in India, little is known about how this idea was made salient to become a current policy priority. Through a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of 90 documents and reports published by government and non-state actors, we identify several discursive strategies used to prioritize FLN as a policy priority in India. These include using science and evidence-based discourse to produce legitimacy for foundational literacy; building consensus by projecting common sense; and producing a temporality of emergency and crisis towards immediate action. We emphasize that the foundational literacy discourse in India is highly political. In particular, we argue that such crisis-driven policy narratives and discourses are not so much tied to specific literacy approaches as they are to larger agendas of privatization and political consensus in education.