India's Silent School Education Crisis

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4.3.2025

BY R.K. MISRA

Spectacles sparkle. The glitzy, eye-blinding, extravaganza that had India in thrall. The 

crushing rush for a momentary dip to cleanse body and soul. The never ending stream 

of religious fervor from the Ram temple to the ‘Mahakumbh’ and on to the next one, 

still in the works…..all designed for ‘deliverance’ of the majority.

With the arch-lamps having been momentarily switched off and the booming 21- gun salute of the ‘media’ artillery subsiding, there are many mundane tasks crying for attention. The state of school education is one of them.

Budgetary allocations may be going up but the enrolment across schools in India has registered a fall.

According to the data released by the Ministry of Education, the enrolment of students has dropped by over a crore in 2023-24. In 2018-19 the total enrolment of students in school was 26.02 crore which increased in 2019-20 by 1.6 per cent and crossed 26.45 crore. A total of 24.8 crore students enrolled in the academic year 2023-24,the Unified District Information System for Education Plus(UDISE) report of the ministry stated.

The states which saw the highest drop in enrolments were Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. In 2018-19 Bihar had an enrolment of over 2.49 crore students which dropped to over 2.13 crore (a fall of 35.65 lakh students). Uttar Pradesh had an enrolment of 4.44 crore students in 2018-19 which fell to 4.16 crore( a fall of 28.26 lakh students). In the case of Maharashtra which had 2.13 crore students, the fall over the same period was to 2.13 crore- less by 18.55 lakh students.

A day before the budget 2025-26 on February 2,2025, the union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey 2024-25 in Parliament, which stated that India’s school education system serves 24.8 crore students across 14.72 lakh schools with 98 lakh teachers (UDISE+ 2023-24).Government schools make up 69 per cent of the total, enrolling 50 per cent of students and employing 51 per cent of teachers, while private schools account for 22.5 per cent enrolling 32.6 per cent of students and employing 38 per cent of teachers.

This year’s education sector allocation has been pitched for a 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) allocation of Rs 1, 28,650.05 crore marking a 6.65 per cent increase over the previous year. “The allocation for school education is Rs 78,572 crore which is the highest ever for the department. “There has been an overall increase of Rs 5,074 crores (7 per cent) in the budget allocation for the department of School Education and Literacy in 2025-26 as compared to the previous year”, union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has stated for the record.

“Window dressing is all fine, but the situation on the ground mirrors an altogether different story”, says Dr Manish Doshi of the Congress. The ministry of education which released reports of school education in 2022-23 and 2023-24 together on December 30, 2024, well behind schedule, paints a grim picture.

 The report attributes no reason for the fall but the inference is that the weeding of bogus students and the correction of outdated records, thanks to the installation of a new digital database system has led to it. Sources in the know aver that the fall has been over two consecutive academic years while the so-called correction of records have been going on for long.

What the government does not want to admit but experts like Doshi connected with the field state is that the increasing economic distress, rising cost of education, especially in private schools, underfunding even closure of government schools are some of the key causative factors. The Prime Minister’s own home state of Gujarat mirrors the decline avidly.

According to the recently released Social Economic Review of Gujarat 2024-25 the total number of primary schools have declined by 1000 in the last five years, the highest decline being recorded in those run by local bodies-from 31,337 in 2019-20 to 30,626 in 2023-24. Similarly in the case of primary schools, their numbers in the state have fallen from 45,315 in 2019-20 to 44,288 in 2023-24.So has the enrollment from 86.14 lakh to 78.47 lakh. There is a noticeable decline in the number of sanctioned seats from 1.85 lakh in 2020-21 to 1.22 lakh in 202-25. Similarly in  diploma courses the number of students have declined from 1.87 lakh in 2020-21 to 1.17 lakh in 2024-25.

The all-round decline notwithstanding, the Gujarat government last month announced a heightened allocation of Rs 59,999 crore towards education in its Rs 3.7 lakh crore annual state budget for the financial year 2025-26. And without a single new scheme!

There is more troubling news for Gujarat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s model state trails the likes of Manipur, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, by a mile in education. This fact is revealed by the sustainable development report-2024 of the Niti Aayog. Kerala tops with 82, followed by Haryana and Himachal Pradesh 77 each with Gujarat getting just 58 which is less than West Bengal, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.  All this despite the fact that from  the time when Modi helmed the state, Gujarat had been running a programme called ”Shaala Praveshotsav” wherein the might of the bureaucracy and the elected wing of the government fan out all over the state to enroll students in school.

In hindsight the spectacle seems to have abysmally failed in achieving its objective for the net enrolment rate in class 1-8 in the state is 89 per cent while Arunachal Pradesh and Assam had cent per cent followed by Andhra Pradesh with 96.9 per cent .It is not enrolment alone which is faltering, the drop out ratio in secondary classes is not much to talk about either. Gujarat stands at 17.9 per cent as compared to Kerala with a mere 5.5 per cent, and Haryana at 5.9 per cent. As of December 2023, a total of 1606 government-run primary schools in the state had only one teacher. In 2019, 36 per cent of the 7.29 lakh students who appeared in the class ten board examinations failed in their mother tongue Gujarati in Gujarat. There has been improvement ever since. Last year the failure rate in Gujarati was only 9 per cent of 5.9 lakh students. Thank God for small mercies!

This syndicated news column was published in the Indian newspapers Orissapost and Lokmat Times editions dated March 4, 2025 . Their links are given below:-

https://odishapostepaper.com/edition/5242/orissapost/page/9

https://epaper.lokmat.com/articlepage.php?articleid=LOKTIME_NPLT_20250304_6_3

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