Yoga in the Indian Classroom: A Scoping Review of the Evidence on Children's Attention, Executive Function, and Behaviour

सार

School-based yoga is widely promoted in India as a classroom practice that improves children's attention, self-regulation, and behaviour, a claim that carries particular policy weight under the National Education Policy 2020's emphasis on yoga as part of India's indigenous knowledge heritage. This paper conducts a scoping review, following Arksey and O'Malley's methodological framework, of the published systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and primary randomized controlled trials examining school-based yoga's effects on children's attention, executive function, and classroom behaviour, with particular attention to studies conducted in Indian school settings. Rather than treating the existing evidence base at face value, the review foregrounds what the source reviews themselves report about effect sizes and methodological quality: pooled effects are consistently small, study quality is frequently limited by small samples, absent or passive control groups, and non-blinded, teacher- or self-reported outcome measures, and the authors of the field's own meta-analyses repeatedly conclude that current evidence is insufficient to support strong causal claims. The review identifies specific Indian randomized controlled trials that meet a higher methodological bar and discusses what distinguishes them. It concludes that school-based yoga is a plausible, low-cost, and culturally resonant classroom practice worth continued rigorous investigation, but that current evidence does not justify the strength of the claims commonly made for it in Indian educational and policy discourse, and it specifies what higher-quality Indian trials would need to look like.