In the era of neoliberal globalisation, education is seen as shaped by the changing city and also implicated in it. Studies from the West have pointed to the complicity of education reforms in urban restructuring, including gentrification and disinvestment in poor neighbourhoods. Closures and rebranding of schools and the privatisation and commercialisation of education have been shown to be integral to making the city conducive to global capital and elite lifestyles (Lipman 2011; Cucchiara 2008; Aggarwal and Mayorga 2016). It is therefore surprising that children and their education are rarely referred to in urban studies scholarship in India, and research on schooling has not been contextualised within the changing city landscapes, with a few exceptions (see, for instance, the India section in Pink and Noblit 2017: 299–467; Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008). In this chapter, I attempt to understand how education is implicated in the changing urban. I focus on Delhi, India's national capital and one of its ‘megacities’.

In the first decade of this century, Delhi geared itself up to become ‘world-class’, driven by imaginaries of cities such as London, Paris and New York. The making of Delhi into a world-class city has been flagged by scholars as having led to increasing spatial polarisation and the sharpening of social inequalities. In this chapter, I examine the implications of Delhi's changing urban trajectory for the education of the city's children. I draw mainly on urban and educational scholarship in Delhi, as well as on relevant policy documents. I also briefly discuss the findings of an exploratory study carried out in late 2019 in the Bawana JJ colony, one of Delhi's new resettlement sites.