Government school closures hit poor students hardest

In December, Madhya Pradesh’s School Education Department found that 7.37 lakh children in the State have no school records at all. They are not enrolled in any school, private or government. Mostly from tribal-dominated districts, they are simply missing from the system. In Jhabua and Shivpuri, for instance, 29,000 children fall into the “Drop Box” category—the Department’s term for those at imminent risk of dropping out. Across the State’s 55 districts, more than 3,500 government schools recorded zero new admissions this academic session. Another 6,500-odd saw fewer than ten. The Department’s response was to instruct every District Education Officer to paste lists of unmapped children on school noticeboards, contact them directly, and upload the details to the State portal. Statewide, 11.38 lakh children fall under the “Drop Box” category. Another 1.23 lakh are already recorded as dropouts. A further 1.55 lakh have left school because their families were displaced or migrated for work. The Department’s flagship outreach programmes, School Chalen Hum and the Home Contact Campaign, were built to prevent exactly this. The State’s audit of its own scheme found three-quarters of a million children whom neither programme had reached. Madhya Pradesh is not an aberration. It is the sharpest expression of a pattern that is now nationwide, and the pattern has a class character that official terms such as rationalisation work hard to obscure. The government’s think tank NITI Aayog’s own analysis puts a number on it: roughly 94,000 government schools have closed over the past decade, an average of 25 a day, contributing to a 2.26 crore decline in government school enrolment. The government school’s share in total enrolment has fallen from 71% in 2005 to 49.24 % in 2024-25. Government data tabled in the Lok Sabha in February confirms the scale. UDISE+ figures show the national count of government schools falling from 11.07 lakh in 2014-15 to 10.17 lakh in 2023-24, a decline of roughly 89,000 that lines up almost exactly with NITI Aayog’s own count. Private schools nationally grew from 2.88 lakh to 3.31 lakh over the same decade. The State-wise breakdown in that same Lok Sabha answer is more revealing than the national total. Madhya Pradesh’s government schools fell from 1.22 lakh in 2018-19 to 99,411 the very next year—a drop of roughly 22,600 in twelve months. Uttar Pradesh’s government schools fell from 1.63 lakh to 1.38 lakh in that identical year, a drop of over 25,000. Two of the country’s largest Hindi-belt States, together educating tens of millions of children, lost school infrastructure at almost the same pace in the same academic year. In the Lok Sabha, the concerned Minister said education is on the concurrent list, and the responsibility for this trend lies entirely with the States. But this is unacceptable. The Union government must take responsibility since the Right To Education that provides for neighbourhood schools is a Central Act, and the mandates it lays down are the Centre’s responsibility. Further, if the Centre can seek to influence State school education by making Central fund allocation for schools conditional on NEP implementation and also impose a language policy, it can certainly step in against school closures, if it wants to. Those working at the grassroots know that the school closure numbers cannot be explained away as gradual demographic drift, urban migration and so on. Rather, it is a coordinated administrative decision taken in States where the poorest and most rural children have the least capacity to compensate for a school that has vanished. Government schools in India are not a neutral public utility used evenly across classes. They are, disproportionately, the schools of the poor—of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and the poorer strata of backward-class communities. India is home to roughly 60% of the world’s below-poverty-line population, and it is their children who fill government classrooms. A 2019 National Sample Survey analysis found access to free education declining unevenly, with Muslim and Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households disproportionately marginalised from the schools nearest to them. Reporting on Jammu and Kashmir’s rationalisation programme documented children now travelling four to six kilometres daily to reach a functioning school, violating neighbourhood school mandates of the RTE. More than 4,300 schools were closed or merged under a rationalisation scheme, with the Lok Sabha’s own UDISE+ figures showing the State’s school count falling from 23,167 in 2020-21 to 18,785 by 2022-23, alongside nearly 13,000 vacant teaching posts reported separately in the State Assembly.The burden falls disproportionately on girls who are the first to be withdrawn when the nearest school stops being nearby. The State’s language of rationalisation and efficiency prices the children of the poor out. What consolidation looks like on the ground is often a single teacher covering five classes at once—unable to know an individual child’s background or tailor instruction, technically in breach of the Right to Education Act’s own staffing and quality norms. This is precisely the objection Jyotirao Phule raised to the colonial state a century and a half ago. In his 1882 memorial to the Hunter Commission, Phule argued that the British government’s own laissez-faire approach to education—pouring resources into higher education for a small, already-privileged class while leaving primary education of the masses underfunded and increasingly reliant on private and missionary institutions—was a betrayal of the state’s basic duty. Primary education, he held, could not be left to private enterprise or philanthropy, because it was the poor, the Shudra and Ati-Shudra cultivator and labourer, who had no means to purchase what the market would not freely give them. The RTE Act, in force since 2010, guarantees free and compulsory education from age six to 14. Secondary school and college were never brought under that guarantee; they were always structurally available to private capital, to be paid for by those who could and rationed for those who couldn’t. The trend of closures and mergers documented above is eating into even that space. The RTE says nothing binding about the quality of what is delivered once a child is inside the classroom. It creates entitlements that children, by definition, cannot assert on their own—and parents, particularly poor and rural parents, often lack the legal and institutional capacity to enforce either. The RTE assumes a symmetry of power between the state, the school, and the family that simply does not exist on the ground. Its justiciability is inevitably underused. School Management Committees, the one mechanism written into the RTE to give parents and communities a formal voice, largely go unconvened. Noted economist Amartya Sen has said that the credit for the educational attainments of Kerala should go to public action. State school education has several stakeholders: government, teachers, students/parents, as well as civil society, including workers and farmers. Since children cannot seek to intervene for themselves, and parents and civil society are not empowered, unlike in Kerala, it is up to the Union government to be the guarantor of free, compulsory nd good quality school education. The educationist Anil Sadgopal has argued that the structure of Indian schooling has not fundamentally changed in a century, tracing the resistance to universal, free education back to the defeat of Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s Compulsory Education Bill in 1911. So many years later, the State has shown a disturbing trend to continue to fund what serves the already-mobile, and to treat the education of the rural and Dalit-Adivasi poor as an expense to be minimised. The author is Chairman, Central Control Commission, CPI(M)