More teachers, better access, fewer pupils: India’s govt school paradox | India News
Schools are back in focus. In larger policy discussions and political debates. The Opposition, emboldened by its NEET protest victory, is looking to up the ante by exposing ramshackle school infrastructure in different states, starting with Rajasthan. TOI ground reports, too, have found gross inadequacies in government schools across different parts of the state. Particularly jarring is the fact that in Kota, widely called the coaching capital of India, many government schools are in a dilapidated state.A wider ground report by TOI reporters across the country found that Rajasthan was hardly an outlier. In Bihar, nearly 200 children from four classes were sharing a single room at one school while cattle occupied two others. In Uttarakhand, leaking roofs meant buckets and umbrellas had become classroom fixtures. In Madhya Pradesh, TOI found schools struggling with teacher shortages and unsafe buildings. Keralam was a prominent exception to this broader picture.However, the fact remains that in a country of 1.4 billion people, structural gaps are perhaps expected, if certainly not desired. A good metric of how much the school system has improved over the years is to look at the data furnished by the central government and its allied agencies. The pan-India numbers make for interesting reading. Rajasthan had 7,200 single-teacher schools in 2025-26, while only 36.4% of schools reported ramps with handrails and 26.3% had toilets tailored for Children with Special Needs (CwSN).The country has nearly a lakh fewer government schools than it did a decade ago, and those schools are losing pupils. It also has more teachers, far fewer children in single-teacher schools, more teenagers reaching higher secondary and internet access in about two-thirds of schools. Fewer than half of schools, however, report a toilet designed for children with special needs. Yet despite improvements in many metrics, government-school enrolment is falling.
From buffaloes and buckets to what the national numbers say
Most of what is known about India’s schools comes from UDISE+, the Unified District Information System for Education Plus. It is an annual, census-like administrative database covering schools across management types. Schools report on their pupils, teachers and infrastructure, from enrolment and staffing to toilets, electricity, ramps, computers and internet access, and they are incorporated into the Union education ministry’s national school statistics.The system grew out of UDISE, created in 2012-13 by merging separate elementary and secondary databases. UDISE+ became its online successor from 2018-19. The government uses it to locate infrastructure gaps, and states draw on it when seeking support for classrooms, toilets, drinking water, electricity, libraries and digital facilities under schemes such as Samagra Shiksha.A school can figure in the database as open and equipped with a particular facility, but reality can be very different. TOI’s visits across states repeatedly brought out that distinction.
Nearly 1 lakh fewer govt schools, but access improves on paper
India had 11,04,796 government schools in 2015-16. Ten years later, UDISE+ records 10,05,245, a difference of 99,551 schools or 9%. The rider is that a school leaving the UDISE count can reflect closure, merger, rationalisation, reclassification or other administrative change.The decline is stark in some states. Madhya Pradesh had 1,21,976 government schools in 2015-16; by 2025-26 the count was 91,199, a reduction of 30,777. Uttar Pradesh fell from 1,62,645 to 1,37,103, a reduction of 25,542. Together, the two states account for about 56.6% of the national net decline over the decade.
Nearly 1 lakh less government school in 10 years
There have also been changes in school mapping and verification, with UDISE+ replacing the older UDISE system from 2018-19. Questioned in Parliament, the Centre has said that decisions on opening, closing and rationalising schools lie largely with states and Union territories, while the Right to Education framework requires elementary schools to remain accessible within prescribed neighbourhood limits.Between 2018-19 and 2024-25, the Gross Access Ratio rose from 88.24% to 95.35% at the secondary level and from 65.05% to 94.97% at higher secondary. GAR measures the proportion of habitations or villages with a school available within the prescribed distance; it is not an enrolment ratio. So although there are fewer schools, the measured access ratio has improved. This is also part of the government’s defence.
Govt schools are losing pupils even as the system improves
Government-school enrolment fell from 12.75 crore in 2023-24 to 11.89 crore in 2025-26, nearly 85.9 lakh fewer pupils in just two years, a decline of 6.7%. Over the same period, enrolment in private unaided schools rose from 9.00 crore to 9.89 crore, an increase of about 88.3 lakh, or 9.8%. The thinning out is also visible over a decade with average enrolment per government school falling from about 132 pupils in 2014-15 to 120 in 2024-25, a decline of roughly 9%; the latest UDISE+ figures put it at about 118 in 2025-26.One figure from the government’s own parliamentary reply captures the scale of it. In 2024-25, government institutions accounted for 68.9% of all schools in India but 49.2% of all enrolment.
The changing mix
A movement this large might be expected to have triggered a substantial investigation. On July 29, 2026, the government was asked why government-school enrolment had fallen from about 12.8 crore to 11.9 crore while private enrolment rose from around 9 crore to 9.9 crore.The ministry confirmed the numbers but did not cite or summarise such an assessment in its reply. Instead, it listed the interventions being made to strengthen government education.NITI Aayog’s 2026 UDISE+-based review says the broader decline in enrolment through 2024-25 is partly attributable to demographic shifts, particularly falling fertility and a smaller school-age population, alongside school consolidation and challenges in retaining pupils at higher levels.Ranabir Bhattacharyya, teacher-in-charge of the English-medium primary section of Chetla Boys’ High School in Kolkata, points to some of the practical issues with UDISE+ and also offers context for the dwindling numbers. He says the data had many issues at one point, but the pipeline has increasingly been made more robust as the government seeks to bring all students onto the platform to roll out various developmental schemes aimed at schoolchildren.He alleges that there was earlier an incentive in certain quarters to inflate pupil numbers, but says tighter vigilance has reduced that tendency and the numbers now being reflected are closer to reality. Ranabir, however, flags other problems like the website can be difficult to use and often suffers technical glitches, while the absence of additional staff increases the workload of those responsible for keeping the data updated. As a result, underreporting can happen too, according to him.
More teachers nationally, TOI finds the gaps locally
India had 96.96 lakh teachers in 2020-21 and 102.73 lakh in 2025-26, nearly 5.77 lakh additional teachers in five years. Single-teacher schools fell from 1,10,971 in 2023-24 to 1,00,843 in 2025-26, and the number of children enrolled in them dropped more steeply still, from 39.94 lakh to 29.12 lakh. Nearly 11 lakh fewer children are now in such schools.But the national improvement hides striking state differences. Andhra Pradesh alone has 16,357 single-teacher schools; Jharkhand has 9,827, Maharashtra 9,269, Karnataka 8,042 and Uttar Pradesh 7,874. Those five states together account for just over half of India’s 1,00,843 single-teacher schools.And this is one area where the statistical picture intersects sharply with what TOI reporters saw. In Madhya Pradesh, TOI found 70 children and one teacher operating from a single dilapidated room at a school in Bhopal’s Kolar, while students in Classes XI and XII at a PM SHRI school in Mandla had gone without teachers for newly introduced streams for a year.
Single teacher school decreasing
Uttarakhand has 2,655 single-teacher schools, about 11.8% of its entire school network, alongside its unusually high proportion of very small schools. The Centre acknowledges the problem. It has told Parliament that recruitment and postings are primarily state responsibilities; and that it repeatedly presses states on faster recruitment and redeployment while supporting them under Samagra Shiksha.Ranabir highlights another issue involving children of migrant labourers. He says that when a student shifts from one school to another, the subsequent UDISE+ entry does not always move smoothly as it requires manual intervention. West Bengal School Education Minister Dipak Barman, speaking to TOI, says many private schools in the state have not uploaded their student lists. Barman says the state is working to get the figures updated. It is hard to know whether similar anomalies exist elsewhere, but if they do, they could significantly undermine the purpose of what the central government is trying to achieve with the UDISE+ platform.
More children stay on, but Class X remains a fault line
The encouraging part is that reported dropout rates are falling. In many states, girl students are incentivised to continue school education. At the same time, higher-secondary Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) rose from 56.2% in 2023-24 to 61.7% in 2025-26, and the secondary dropout rate fell from 14.1% to 9.5% over the same period. Here too, the national number hides enormous variation. Keralam, for instance, reported secondary retention of 99.1% in 2025-26.
Drop-outs decreasing
For many from financially weaker sections, there is a significant opportunity cost to staying in school after Class X. The government has therefore deployed a range of measures to keep more students in the system. Parliamentary replies point to PM POSHAN, residential schools and hostels, KGBVs, transport assistance, free textbooks and uniforms, enrolment campaigns and vocational education, and more recently to Vidya Samiksha Kendras and APAAR IDs as tools for tracking students who drop out or move between schools.
Digital access surges, but TOI finds a different classroom reality
In step with the government’s Digital India push, digital infrastructure has expanded rapidly. In 2020-21, 24.5% of schools reported internet access; by 2025-26, 67.4% did. Computer availability rose from 41.3% to 69.9%. The approved budget for ICT labs, smart classrooms and other digital initiatives rose from ₹381.1 crore in 2018-19 to ₹3,221.1 crore in 2025-26.NITI Aayog’s 2026 UDISE+-based analysis of functional smart classrooms shows coverage rising from 14.9% of schools in 2021-22 to 30.6% in 2024-25. In other words, even after rapid expansion, nearly seven in ten schools still lacked one.The interstate divide is striking. Punjab reported functional smart classrooms in 80.1% of schools and Delhi in 75.7%; the corresponding figures were only 4.3% in Meghalaya, 5.7% in West Bengal, 14.9% in Bihar and 19.8% in Uttar Pradesh. Tamil Nadu offers the opposite story: its reported coverage went from virtually zero in 2021-22 to 60.8% in 2024-25.TOI’s ground visits underline why infrastructure numbers need context. In Uttar Pradesh, schools visited by reporters had toilets and drinking water, but digital resources were missing; in Himachal Pradesh, strong coverage of basic facilities coexisted with substantially weaker smart-classroom and disability-access indicators.Regarding West Bengal’s poor showing, Barman says many of the state’s UDISE+ figures have not been properly updated and that the government is working to correct them, and is looking to start 2000 smart classrooms in the next one year. He says Bengal expects to be among the top 10 when the next calculation is made.
Toilets on paper, TOI finds the functionality gap on the ground
India is now close to universal provision of toilet facilities in schools, at least on paper. UDISE+ reports girls’-toilet availability in 98.5% of girls’ and co-educational schools in 2025-26. But availability and functionality are not the same.TOI’s ground reporting provides a simple illustration of that distinction. Schools visited in Uttar Pradesh had separate toilets for boys and girls, but reporters found many of them unclean, with teachers blaming the absence of sanitation workers. This issue of not having adequate sanitation staff is something Ranabir also flagged repeatedly.The same NITI Aayog analysis, using 2024-25 data, puts national functional girls’-toilet coverage at 94%, up from 85.17% a decade earlier. Yet the state map remains uneven.In 2024-25, Bihar and Odisha were both at 98.1% functional girls’-toilet coverage and West Bengal at 99.6%, while Rajasthan stood at 87.3%. Meghalaya was at 68.7%, Arunachal Pradesh 73.7% and Manipur 74.5%.
The basic-access gap remains
In 2020-21, 24.5% of schools reported internet access and 41.3% computers. About 48.3% reported ramps with handrails and 25.3% toilets for children with special needs. By 2025-26, internet availability had reached 67.4% and computers 69.9%. Ramps with handrails were at 58.2%, while CwSN-friendly toilets stood at only 40.1%.The state contrasts are revealing. Himachal Pradesh reports functional electricity in 99.1% of schools and computers in 87.2%, but internet reaches only 66.2% and CwSN-friendly toilets 34%. At the same time, 18.3% of its schools are single-teacher schools and almost half have 30 pupils or fewer.
Basic access gap remains
Keralam, the prominent exception in TOI’s ground reporting, also stands apart on several UDISE measures. Computer availability is 99.5%, internet access 92.6%, and only 67 schools, about 0.4% of its network, are single-teacher schools. Secondary retention is 99.1%. The state is not without gaps, only around 51.7% of schools report CwSN-friendly toilets but the overall contrast with many other states is striking.The Accessibility Code was notified in 2024, and Samagra Shiksha and PM SHRI provide funds for facility upliftment. Ranabir says funds often come in a trickle or are regularly delayed. As a result, he says, many of these metrics do not improve as smoothly as desired. He also highlights that many rural schools have irregular electricity supply, and hence while internet and other digital facilities are present on paper, reality can be different.Taken together, most of these service and outcome indicators have moved positively. Yet government-school enrolment is falling. That may partly reflect an aspirational society where some parents are looking to private schools for stronger English-language exposure, soft skills, peer networks and perceived advantages in college and beyond. Anecdotally, one can also see the mushrooming of English-medium schools in suburbs and mofussils.
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But the national data do not by themselves establish why families make these choices. Some of the decline may also reflect cleaner data and ironically even lack of proper uploading of data as pointed out by the Bengal education minister.There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a large country. The data show substantial progress on several fronts, yet the lived reality may be different in some places. For now, the government will need to tick the boxes on what should be absolutely non-negotiable in terms of core deliverables, including the lacunae exposed in those reports. Winning the larger battle for aspiration may be a challenge for another day, or another decade.
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