Epistemicide and educational equity: challenging knowledge hierarchies in India’s vocational education

India’s vocational education system, often positioned as a vehicle for economic mobility among marginalized groups, paradoxically operates as an assimilationist apparatus that erodes indigenous knowledge systems. Drawing on subaltern theory and epistemologies of the South, this critical policy ethnography argues that contemporary reforms perpetuate epistemicide. Despite inclusive policy rhetoric, only 4.1% of India’s working-age population participates in formal training, while 93% rely on informal systems of ecological expertise, apprenticeships, and intergenerational skill transmission, all rendered invisible under standardized credentialing. The National Skills Qualification Framework privileges industry-aligned competencies, embedding monocultural logics that reproduce caste, gender, linguistic, and regional inequalities. These stratifying dynamics channel minorities into low-prestige trades while elites monopolize professional education. To resist such hierarchies, the study advocates for academic interventions for epistemic pluralism.