Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Indian Schools

In a country where rape and harassment cover headlines every day and where we rank 131 out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2025, the lowest among all South-Asian countries, one would expect a more positive response in integrating CSE in schools. However, the general attitude is that of aversion or fear-mongering, where educators often turn to moral policing to keep students in “check”, which often leads to widespread sharing of unverified, false information among peers, increasing the risk of teenage pregnancies and lack of gender-affirming care. India's resistance to comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) stems from societal, cultural, and policy-level barriers. Despite urgent public health needs, only minimal CSE content is present within school curricula under NEP 2020, framed largely under “ethical and moral reasoning”. This ambiguous positioning leaves critical gaps in students' knowledge about sexuality, consent, and reproductive health. The lack of robust CSE thus perpetuates myths, misinformation, and stigma, especially as several states have banned sex education outright in schools, citing eroding of“Indian values” as justification.

With a projected 253 million adolescents (aged 10-19) in India by 2025, the world's largest adolescent population faces risks of early pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), mental health concerns, and gender-based violence in the absence of CSE. Rural regions continue to report a high prevalence of early sexual debut, over 50% before age 18, and risky sexual behaviours due to poverty and lack of accurate health information. This drives higher maternal mortality, unmet contraception needs, and preventable STIs and HIV/AIDS cases.

Children between 0 and 14 years constitute 24% of the population in India, while adolescents and young adults between 10 and 24 years constitute 26%, and those between 10 and 19 years constitute 17%, as of 2025. It is also one of the countries
that is steeped in caste discrimination and avoids any conversation around the topics of Sexual and reproductive Health (SRH).

Children and young adults often base their opinion of themselves on what their family, friends, and teachers say about their appearance and their qualities. Added to this are the various messages and ideas that young people get from the internet and popular media. Popular media has been notorious for misrepresenting women's bodies, and has often magnified society's existing misogyny, stereotypes and social norms.

If we look at a television ad of menstrual products, especially pads, we will always observe that most of them use a blue liquid to signify blood. Are we so ashamed to show a biological process? In movies and music, women are often objectified, and there is negligible representation of queer, disabled or different gender identities. The
media often decides which body types are acceptable, and puts women in boxes of ‘fat', ‘thin', ‘too smart', ‘too dumb', etc. With the absence of a holistic CSE curriculum, young children often equate their self-esteem with their appearances, falling into a vicious cycle of diet culture, anorexia, because the pressure to conform to society's beauty standards is enormous. This paper shows how there has been a steady increase in children with eating disorders over the years. Although strides have been taken to ensure information regarding SRH reaches to the population that most requires it, we still do not have a uniform program or a nationwide CSE curriculum for addressing the essential SRH needs of our children and youth today.

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in Indian schools is at a critical crossroads, with urgent data highlighting both the immense need and the real potential for social transformation through robust, research-backed interventions.
The CSE curriculum is a scientific and informed approach, giving students and young adults of all ages tools and resources to equip them to make informed decisions about their lives. The various CSE components aim to give kids and teens the information, mindsets, and abilities they need to enhance their health, well-being, and dignity; think about how their decisions will affect other people's well-being; recognise and exercise their rights; and respect others' rights. It includes important areas of discussion such as consent, boundaries, emotions, relationships, body, sexuality, menstruation and inclusion of men in menstruation, practising safe sex, masturbation, gender-based violence, and how to respond to and prevent it.

However, in a country like India, we still hesitate to talk openly about menstruation, sexuality, pleasure, eroticism, etc. Women from various sections of society, especially teachers, sometimes vehemently oppose any such discussions, citing that it will spoil the children, or they are too young to learn anything about sexuality education. Cis het men are never taught about menstruation, and women are actively encouraged from speak about menstruation to the male members of their social circle. Most of the CSE and Personal safety education that is available today is based on fear-mongering and abstinence, which focuses primarily on promoting abstinence outside of marriage.
This substantially harms young people's perception of themselves and their relationships, and often forces young people to access different forms of unverified and potentially harmful ways of learning about their bodies and rights.