Analyzing the trope of “light but tight” education frequently used in India's New Education Policy 2020, this paper examines the mutually reinforcing ideological connections between neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the state's latest vision for education. In the context of global economic crisis and pandemic-induced global indebtedness, it intensifies primitive accumulation of capital in all sectors including education via marketization, privatization, new public managerialism in education through teachers’ surveillance, and increased job insecurity and focuses on revision of curricula by introducing chauvinist ideas of India's neoconservative ideology engendered by Hindutva radicalism. Students as consumers and teachers as service providers decenter the progressive purpose of knowledge production by reorienting concerns of social justice into marketable commodities. This new reality is evinced in the rising cases of suicides among students from socially and economically oppressed sections, incarceration of student activists, erosion of socially inclusive admission policies, and criminalization of socially progressive thought.