The Hindu: Published on 3 August 2026
A recent NITI Aayog report has quantified a stark reality long visible in rural India: roughly 94,000 government schools have shut over the past decade; an average of 25 every day. Government schools’ share of total enrolment has slumped from 71% in 2005 to 49.24% in 2024-25, with 2.26 crore fewer children in the system. This is not mere demographic drift or urban migration. It is the outcome of deliberate “rationalisation” policies pursued across states, often in the name of efficiency, that are systematically stripping the poorest children of the only schools within reach.
The Scale and Geography of Closure
UDISE+ data tabled in the Lok Sabha confirms the national picture: government schools fell from 11.07 lakh in 2014-15 to 10.17 lakh in 2023-24; a decline of nearly 89,000 institutions. Private schools, by contrast, expanded from 2.88 lakh to 3.31 lakh in the same period.
The sharpest losses have been concentrated in a few states. Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir stand out. In a single year (2018-19 to 2019-20), Madhya Pradesh’s government school count dropped by about 22,600 (from 1.22 lakh to 99,411). Uttar Pradesh lost more than 25,000 schools in the same window. In Jammu & Kashmir, more than 4,300 schools were closed or merged under rationalisation; the state’s school numbers fell from 23,167 in 2020-21 to 18,859 by 2022-23. Children in several areas now walk 4–6 km daily, in clear violation of the neighbourhood-school mandate under the Right to Education Act.
Madhya Pradesh’s own education department data from December 2025 is particularly alarming. It identified 7.37 lakh children with no school records at all. Statewide, 11.38 lakh children sit in the “Drop Box” category (at imminent risk of dropping out), another 1.23 lakh are already recorded as dropouts, and 1.55 lakh have left because of family displacement or migration. In districts such as Jhabua and Shivpuri alone, 29,000 children fall into this high-risk group. More than 3,500 government schools recorded zero new admissions this academic session; another 6,500 saw fewer than ten. The state’s flagship outreach programmes; School Chalen Hum and the Home Contact Campaign, failed to reach three-quarters of a million children, according to its own audit.
Who Pays the Price
Government schools are not a neutral public service used evenly across society. They remain the primary; often the only; educational option for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and poorer Other Backward Class children, as well as for a large share of Muslim households. A 2019 National Sample Survey analysis already showed that access to free education was declining unevenly, with these communities disproportionately pushed away from the schools nearest to them.
When the nearest school disappears, girls are usually the first to be withdrawn. Longer distances, safety concerns and the higher opportunity cost of travel fall heaviest on them. Consolidation also produces pedagogical absurdities: single teachers managing five classes simultaneously, unable to know individual children or tailor instruction; conditions that themselves breach RTE staffing and quality norms.
Policy Tension and Responsibility
The National Education Policy 2020 endorses rationalisation of schools, but with an explicit caveat: it must not endanger the concept of neighbourhood schools. That safeguard has been widely ignored. In the Lok Sabha the Union government has taken the position that education is on the Concurrent List and that responsibility for the trend therefore rests with the states. Yet the RTE Act is a Central law whose core guarantee; free and compulsory education within a neighbourhood school for every child aged 6–14; is being hollowed out on the ground.
Moreover, the Centre itself shapes state behaviour through funding conditionality linked to NEP implementation and through language-policy prescriptions. School Management Committees, the one institutional mechanism the RTE created to give parents a formal voice, largely remain unconvened. The Act creates entitlements that children cannot enforce and that poor, rural parents rarely have the capacity or institutional access to assert. In practice, RTE is only weakly justiciable.
The Larger Question
India still accounts for roughly 60% of the world’s population living below the poverty line. For the children of these households, a government school is not an optional public utility; it is the difference between literacy and lifelong exclusion. Rationalisation that simply deletes the nearest school and assumes families will somehow bridge the gap is not efficient; it is the quiet privatisation of a fundamental right through administrative attrition.
The data now available from NITI Aayog, UDISE+, state education departments and Parliament leave little room for ambiguity. The question is no longer whether the closures are happening, but whether the constitutional and statutory commitment to neighbourhood schooling will be defended before the remaining government schools become residual institutions serving only those with nowhere else to go.
