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The incidence of the COVID-19 pandemic has come as a big blow to every dimension of any economy. It disrupts the usual constructs and functioning of economies across the globe. Different macroeconomic variables such as income, employment, etc. have been in shambles because of the unprecedented pandemic. Such a situation needs an alternative thought to turn around everything, and circular economic approach indeed is a potent tool to weather this tumultuous situation. Circular economic framework facilitates recycling and reusing of wastes discarded. Because of various activities, wastes are generated, and if products could be generated out of wastes through a system, it would be beneficial to economies as this ensures the judicious utilisation of resources. Recycling, refurbishing and reducing are three important pillars of the circular economic framework, where product lifecycle gets extended and prudent use of existing resources can be possible. The usage of resources even out of wastes stands out to be a game changer in terms of sustainability of environment. The alternative usage of resources in this way creates alternative employment opportunities. The extension of product lifecycle through recycling and reusing creates alternative rooms for employment, giving ample opportunities for sustainable development. It leads to market creation for waste products. Such a circular economy approach, paving the way for alternative employment generation, leads to sustainable development. The present work tries to re-examine the efficacy of the circular economic framework and its resilience in the context of the unprecedented pandemic in terms of providing alternative employment opportunities. It attempts to underscore how circular economic construct positively impacts prudent use of resources through alternative employment generation in pandemic.

In pursuit of achieving Education‐For‐All goals of universal primary education and improving quality of education, the Indian Government has been providing substantial resources to Indian states. The responsibility of providing access and quality remains the states' responsibility. Assessment of educational development will therefore become a focal point of the Center for Education Policy & Guidelines Formulation. While educational development indices help in ranking states, they do not help in capturing best practices and assessing the efficient utilization of resources. Assessment of the Educational Development Efficiency can augment educational development indices in vogue. The purpose of this paper is to develop an Educational Development Efficiency (EDE) model to benchmark the Indian states.

This paper uses an input‐process‐output conceptual framework to identify the dimensions of educational development. This paper employs Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compare relative efficiency of 28 states and seven Union territories in India and benchmark them. In order to strengthen the discriminatory power of DEA, cross‐efficiency model was used. Factor analysis was performed to determine the inter‐relationships between variables. The efficiency impacting variables were identified using multiple regression analysis.

This paper benchmarked Indian states on educational development based on their performance. Gross enrolment ratio, students' academic performance and infrastructural investments were identified as the three key variables impacting states' EDE. This paper has shown that the educational administrators can use the EDE model to identify the best practices from efficient states. Insights into utilization of input resources to enhance educational development and consequent improvement of state efficiencies are presented. Four components have been identified to analyze the states' educational development progress – namely, financial adequacy, school resource strength, educational quality and educational access.

Contributions of this paper pertain to evolving a decision support model for national education policy planners, besides providing analytic support to the administrators of the states to benchmark and emulate the efficient educational programs.

This paper is one of the few published studies concerning the evaluation of educational development programs launched in the Indian schools and providing a cross‐comparison of the Indian states for the purposes of performance benchmarking as well as exploring the influencing factors.