Krantijyoti Vidyalay Shows How Commercialised Education Is Killing Both Schools and Languages
There is a temptation to view Krantijyoti Vidyalay Marathi Madhyam as a nostalgic film about Marathi-medium education, a sentimental look back at chalkboards, uniforms, and childhood memories. That reading is comfortable. It is also incomplete. What the film actually does is far more unsettling. It holds up a mirror to India’s education system and asks an uncomfortable question: when education becomes a luxury product, what happens to those who cannot afford the price, and to the languages that once carried knowledge to the masses?
At its core, the film demolishes a myth that has quietly taken root across urban and semi-urban India: that quality education and regional languages cannot coexist. For years, parents have been made to believe that affordable schooling is a compromise, and that language-based education is a handicap. The movie exposes this lie not through slogans, but through lived reality. The classrooms it shows are not failing because of language. They are failing because the system has decided they no longer deserve to survive.
What the film confronts head-on is the rise of the so-called “five-star” education model. Schools marketed like premium real estate projects. Shiny campuses, air-conditioned classrooms, international boards, and fee structures that quietly exclude most families while claiming to represent progress. Education, once a public good, has been repackaged as a consumer experience. The film makes it painfully clear that when profit becomes the primary metric, affordability becomes an inconvenience, not a goal.
Perhaps the most important contribution of the film is how it shows that government and low-cost schools are not simply “outdated” or “unviable.” They are engineered to fail. The process is slow and procedural. Enrolment drops because alternatives are aggressively marketed. Infrastructure deteriorates because investment dries up. Compliance requirements pile up. Eventually, closure is justified as inevitability. The film captures this quiet cruelty with precision. Schools are not shut down with outrage. They are allowed to suffocate until their disappearance feels normal.
In this process, language becomes collateral damage. Languages do not vanish because people stop valuing them. They vanish because the institutions that sustain daily, functional use are dismantled. When a school shuts down, a language loses one of its most vital spaces. The film understands this deeply. It shows that linguistic erosion is not cultural decay. It is economic fallout. Once education shifts upward into elite spaces, the language of the masses is left behind.
Crucially, the film refuses to blame parents. It recognises a truth policymakers often ignore. Parents are not abandoning affordable education out of arrogance or misplaced pride. They are responding to a system that systematically signals neglect. When public schools are allowed to crumble and private schools are marketed as gateways to survival, choice becomes an illusion. The blame lies with policies that reward commercial operators and abandon community institutions.
What makes this film resonate far beyond Maharashtra is that its warning is universal. Today it is Marathi-medium schools. Tomorrow it could be any regional language, any low-cost institution, any community-based model of learning. The mechanism is the same. Price education high enough, dress it up as aspiration, and quietly erase alternatives.
Krantijyoti Vidyalay matters because it names the real crisis. India is not suffering from a lack of ambition. It is suffering from the criminal commercialisation of education. A system that treats schools as businesses will inevitably discard those who cannot pay. And when that happens, languages, communities, and access are the first casualties.
The film does not offer easy solutions, and that is its strength. It leaves viewers with a question that lingers long after the credits roll: if education is no longer treated as essential infrastructure but as a luxury product, what kind of society are we building, and who is it really for?
