India’s vast K-12 administrative apparatus continues to be constrained by multi-layered hierarchical structures that privilege procedural compliance over instructional leadership and rapid responsiveness, generating systemic inertia that undermines learning recovery, equity and adaptive capacity even after ambitious reforms. Persistent administrative overload on principals, severe middle-tier vacancies and fragmented delivery chains have limited the translation of policy intent into classroom outcomes, as documented in recent national assessments. Existing scholarship has yet to systematically transpose OECD multi-level governance principles—distributed leadership, calibrated school autonomy and agile feedback mechanisms—onto India’s concurrent federal architecture and the institutional innovations envisaged under the National Education Policy 2020. This study therefore diagnoses the precise mechanisms of bureaucratic inertia across state directorates, district and block offices and emerging school complexes, benchmarks them against OECD standards of adaptive educational governance, and develops concrete re-engineering pathways that convert rigid hierarchies into outcome-oriented, agile systems. Drawing on comparative policy analysis of NEP 2020 provisions on school complexes and regulatory separation, OECD insights including the Delhi frontline-empowerment experience, and secondary evidence from UDISE+, PARAKH and ASER, the analysis reveals that legalistic norms and clerical burdens reduce middle managers to transmission roles while constraining principal instructional time. Re-calibrating authority toward empowered school complexes and distributed leadership can reverse these dynamics. The resulting model offers a scalable hybrid of hierarchical accountability and agile adaptation, essential for accelerating foundational learning, equity and system resilience on the path to Viksit Bharat 2047 and the realisation of SDG 4.