From counting schools to measuring whether a country actually educates its children
September, 2026
Abstract
India’s school-education debate has frequently been framed as a problem of access: how many schools exist, how many children are enrolled, and how many classrooms have been constructed. The latest evidence suggests that this framing is incomplete. The more consequential question is what those schools contain, whom they can serve, how far they carry children through the education cycle, and whether the education delivered is sufficiently strong to make later learning and employment possible.
A parliamentary committee in August 2026 highlighted a dramatic fall in the number of schools and students as educational levels rise. Using UDISE+ 2024–25 data, it noted 9,11,032 primary schools, 4,12,805 upper-primary schools, 1,61,808 secondary schools and only 90,866 higher-secondary schools within the category of government and government-aided schools cited in its analysis. Student numbers fell from 61.85 million in primary to 40.89 million in upper primary, 23.67 million in secondary and 16.42 million in higher secondary. The committee described this as evidence that nearly 73% of students leave the pipeline before higher secondary. That interpretation captures a serious structural problem, but the 73% figure should not be confused with a conventional cohort dropout rate, because the cited enrolment stocks belong to different stages and years of schooling. Official UDISE+ transition and retention measures provide a more methodologically defensible picture. (ndtv.com)
The central argument of this article is that India’s educational problem is simultaneously an access problem, a quality problem, a poverty problem and an equity problem. A child who cannot afford private schooling is entitled to use the public system, but entitlement without comparable educational capability can reproduce inequality through public provision itself. Recent evidence from Rajasthan illustrates the point starkly: alongside schools without buildings, there are large numbers of schools with deficits in toilets, drinking water, accessible infrastructure, classrooms and teachers. At the national level, only 63.5% of schools had internet facilities in UDISE+ 2024–25, 54.9% had ramps with handrails, and 35.6% had facilities for children with special needs toilets. (education.gov.in)
A modern state therefore cannot assess educational success by school construction alone. It must guarantee an education entitlement that is meaningful, not merely formal: a school building, qualified teachers, adequate instructional time, laboratories, libraries, sanitation, digital access, disability access, transport where necessary, and a curriculum that produces foundational literacy, numeracy, secondary-level competence and the capacity for further learning.
Rajasthan: 611 Government Schools Have No Buildings, Govt Admits in Assembly | School Infra Crisis — NEWS9 Live, August 21, 2026. The report directly illustrates the article’s central distinction between the statistical existence of a school and the conditions under which education is actually delivered.
1. The real warning contained in the “73% dropout” story
The August 2026 parliamentary report deserves attention not simply because it uses a dramatic percentage, but because the underlying structure of the data exposes a persistent problem.
The Committee on Estimates reported that, according to UDISE+ 2024–25, the government and government-aided school system it examined contained approximately 9.11 lakh primary schools, 4.13 lakh upper-primary schools, 1.62 lakh secondary schools and only 0.91 lakh higher-secondary schools. The corresponding student numbers fell from approximately 6.18 crore in primary education to 4.09 crore in upper primary, 2.37 crore in secondary and 1.64 crore in higher secondary. The committee consequently described a “drastic decline” in schools and students as education levels rise and called for upgrading existing schools into full higher-secondary institutions. (ndtv.com)
The policy implication is significant even without accepting the committee’s 73% formulation literally. A national education system in which large numbers of children encounter a progressively thinner supply of secondary and higher-secondary institutions creates predictable barriers to continuation. Distance, transport, family income, opportunity costs, adolescent work, household responsibilities, gender and safety concerns can all become more important precisely when schooling becomes more specialized.
The official transition indicators provide a cleaner description of this progression. In 2024–25, India’s transition rate was 92.2% from primary to upper primary, 86.6% from upper primary to secondary, and 75.1% from secondary to higher secondary. In other words, the transition bottleneck becomes progressively more severe as children move upward through the system. (dsel.education.gov.in)
Retention data point in the same direction. For 2024–25, national retention stood at 98.9% at the foundational stage, 92.4% at the preparatory stage, 82.8% at the middle stage and only 47.2% at the secondary stage under the UDISE+ measure reported to Parliament. Rajasthan’s corresponding figures were 89.6%, 83.1%, 78.7% and 51.9%. (education.gov.in)
These numbers matter because a school system can achieve near-universal primary enrolment and still fail to produce universal secondary education. The bottleneck has merely moved upward.
2. The distinction between having a school and having an education
The most important analytical shift is from school availability to educational capability.
India had 1,471,473 schools in UDISE+ 2024–25, including 1,013,322 government schools, 79,349 government-aided schools and 339,583 recognized private unaided schools. These are substantial numbers. But a school count says almost nothing about the learning environment inside those institutions. (dsel.education.gov.in)
The national infrastructure figures illustrate this distinction. In 2024–25:
- 99.3% of schools reported drinking-water availability;
- 93.6% reported electricity;
- 89.5% reported libraries;
- 83.0% reported playgrounds;
- 64.7% reported computer facilities;
- 63.5% reported internet facilities;
- 54.9% reported ramps with handrails; and
- only 35.6% reported toilets for children with special needs. (education.gov.in)
The picture becomes more consequential when the question is not whether a facility exists somewhere on the premises, but whether the facility is usable, functional and pedagogically relevant. UDISE+ itself distinguishes between mere computer availability and functional computers for pedagogical purposes. For India in 2024–25, 951,868 schools had a computer facility, but only 852,684 had functional computer facilities for pedagogical purposes. Similarly, 933,987 schools reported internet facilities out of 1.47 million schools. (dsel.education.gov.in)
This distinction is fundamental. A computer room without functioning devices, an internet connection without reliable bandwidth, a laboratory without equipment, a library without books or a toilet without water do not constitute equivalent educational resources.
The same principle applies to the teacher.
A school with one teacher handling several grades is not functionally equivalent to a school with subject teachers, academic leadership, counselling support and adequate staffing. The physical existence of a registered school therefore overstates the educational capacity available to a child unless the quality and staffing dimensions are measured alongside it.
3. Rajasthan demonstrates why infrastructure statistics cannot be reduced to “number of schools”
The recent Rajasthan disclosures provide a particularly concrete illustration.
In August 2026, information placed before the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly indicated that 611 government schools did not have buildings of their own. Among government schools with buildings, 2,047 reportedly lacked toilets for children and 1,049 lacked drinking-water facilities, according to the state data reported by The Times of India. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
The Times of India subsequently reported a much wider infrastructure backlog from state data: 3,768 school buildings and 83,783 classrooms were classified as entirely dilapidated, while 16,765 toilets were reported in that condition; a further 219,902 classrooms and 29,753 toilets reportedly required repair. The same report stated that Rajasthan had approximately 7,200 single-teacher government schools serving more than 1.5 lakh students and approximately 1.5 lakh sanctioned teaching posts vacant. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
These figures should be understood carefully. Some are reported findings from state data and some are media-ground-report calculations; they should not be conflated into one homogeneous administrative dataset. Nevertheless, their cumulative implication is clear: the question is not merely whether Rajasthan has tens of thousands of schools. It is whether those schools constitute a minimally reliable educational service.
The problem is not restricted to buildings. UDISE+ 2024–25 recorded 106,302 schools in Rajasthan. Of these, 56,702 had computer facilities, 74,358 had internet, 105,460 had drinking water, 37,579 had ramps with handrails and only 24,246 had toilets for children with special needs. (dsel.education.gov.in)
Thus even after substantial expansion of infrastructure over previous decades, the capabilities available to students remain uneven.
This is why “we have built X thousand schools” is an inadequate measure of educational progress. The state should instead ask:
Can a child reliably attend the school?
Is there a safe building?
Is there a teacher for the subjects being studied?
Is there usable electricity and internet?
Is there a laboratory where science requires one?
Is there a functioning library?
Is there sanitation and drinking water?
Is the school accessible to a child with a disability?
Can the student continue through Class XII without having to leave the locality or family income structure?
A school that fails these tests may still exist statistically while functioning inadequately as an institution.
4. Poverty changes the meaning of “choice”
The most important equity problem emerges when schooling is formally free but high-quality schooling is not equally affordable.
The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Comprehensive Modular Survey: Education 2025 provides unusually useful evidence on household expenditure. Government schools accounted for 55.9% of current school enrolment nationally, rising to 66.0% in rural India. Private unaided recognized schools accounted for 31.9% nationally and 51.4% in urban areas. (mospi.gov.in)
More importantly, the average household expenditure per student on school education in the current academic year was estimated at ₹2,863 (about US$30) in government schools compared with ₹25,002 (about US$261) in non-government schools. Only 26.7% of students in government schools reported paying course fees, compared with 95.7% in non-government schools. (mospi.gov.in)
For comparability throughout this article, USD equivalents use approximately ₹95.8 per US$1, based on the September 21, 2026 reported rupee close. These conversions are illustrative current-rate equivalents and are not adjusted for historical exchange-rate differences or inflation.
The economic asymmetry is therefore substantial. For many families, private schooling is not a marginally more expensive alternative; it represents an entirely different cost structure.
That produces a difficult policy question.
Suppose two children possess broadly similar academic potential. One child is born into a household able to spend ₹20,000–₹30,000 (approximately US$209–US$313) or more per year on school-related expenditure, while another is born into a household for which even transport, uniforms, examination expenses and opportunity costs are difficult to absorb. The first family can purchase access to a broader set of educational options. The second family is largely dependent on the government system.
This is not merely a problem of consumer choice. It is a problem of the distribution of human capital by family income.
The state’s obligation, consequently, cannot end with the proposition that a public school seat exists. The more demanding principle is that public schooling must provide an educational floor sufficiently strong that poverty does not automatically translate into permanent educational disadvantage.
5. The public–private learning gap: real, but more complicated than it first appears
The argument that private schools provide better outcomes cannot simply be dismissed.
ASER 2024 provides direct evidence of a persistent difference in rural India. In Rajasthan, among Class V children, the share able to read a Class II-level text was approximately 37.7% in government schools versus 63.5% in private schools. At Class VIII, the corresponding figures were 63.8% versus 80.6%. (asercentre.org)
The national ASER picture also shows a sizeable gap. In 2024, 44.8% of Class V children in government schools could read a Class II-level text, compared with 59.3% in private schools. Government-school results improved substantially after the pandemic, demonstrating that the public system is capable of recovery and improvement, but the private–government gap remains visible. (asercentre.org)
Yet raw differences should not be treated as proof that attending a private school automatically causes the entire learning advantage.
Private schools often attract families with greater financial resources, stronger educational expectations, more educated parents and different levels of home support. Research on India has therefore produced mixed causal estimates. Some studies find that much of the observed private-school advantage shrinks when socioeconomic characteristics and selection are controlled for, while other research finds persistent advantages under particular specifications and locations (Chudgar & Quin, 2012; French, 2017; Singhal & Das, 2019). More recent work likewise emphasizes that socioeconomic selection and school-level factors interact rather than providing a single explanation. (sciencedirect.com)
This distinction matters because the policy objective should not be to prove that “private is good” and “government is bad.” Both propositions are too crude.
The defensible proposition is narrower and more important:
A public school system should not become a low-quality educational track for children whose families lack the money to exit it.
Once a private school becomes the practical route to stronger English exposure, more instructional time, greater subject choice, better laboratories, more stable staffing or more academically intensive peer environments, household income begins to influence educational opportunity independently of academic ability.
That is the equity problem.
6. Poverty does not simply reduce schooling; it reduces future trainability
The economic consequences of inadequate education extend beyond the immediate loss of classroom time.
The World Bank’s 2024 Learning Poverty estimate for India placed learning poverty at 56%, meaning that a majority of children at late-primary age were estimated to be unable to read and understand a simple age-appropriate text, after accounting for children who are out of school. The World Bank estimated India’s learning-adjusted years of schooling at approximately 7.1 years and its Human Capital Index at 0.49 in the cited dataset. (documents1.worldbank.org)
The point is conceptually important. Schooling without learning does not generate the full stock of human capital that years of enrolment imply.
The labour-market evidence reinforces this.
The International Labour Organization’s India Employment Report 2024, using employment data through 2022, found substantial earnings differences by education level even after controlling for factors including experience, gender, sector, social group, technical education, vocational education and geography. Its Mincerian estimates found that the return associated with graduate education was 5.6 times that associated with secondary or higher-secondary education, while the corresponding figure for post-graduate education was 9.2 times that of the secondary/higher-secondary category. The report also concluded that the relative importance of higher educational qualifications for access to higher-paying jobs had widened over time. (ilo.org)
The precise coefficients should not be interpreted as a guarantee that every graduate will earn 5.6 times more than every secondary-school graduate. They are regression-based estimates of educational returns for particular populations. Nevertheless, they establish a larger proposition: educational attainment is strongly connected to labour-market opportunity.
The ILO further found that formal vocational training was associated in 2022 with better employment quality: formally trained youth were more likely to hold regular wage and salaried work and were more likely to be in formal employment than youth without vocational training. (ilo.org)
This provides a better way to frame the concern that insufficient schooling produces people who are difficult to train.
People are not inherently “untrainable.” The more accurate formulation is that weak foundational education raises the cost of later training and narrows the set of skills that workers can realistically acquire. Someone who leaves school without reliable reading, numerical reasoning, digital familiarity and the ability to learn independently enters adulthood with a smaller platform from which future training can proceed.
That is a national productivity problem.
7. Secondary education should be treated as infrastructure for the economy
The conventional development model separates roads, electricity, telecommunications and physical infrastructure from education. Economically, this distinction is increasingly difficult to defend.
A road connects a person to a market.
A reliable internet connection connects a person to information and work.
A school connects a person to knowledge.
But the analogy becomes even stronger at secondary level because modern economic activity increasingly requires workers who can:
- read and interpret complex instructions;
- perform quantitative reasoning;
- use digital tools;
- learn unfamiliar procedures;
- communicate effectively;
- understand scientific and technological concepts;
- adapt to changing occupations.
The World Bank’s human-capital framework explicitly connects education and health outcomes in childhood with the productivity of the future workforce. (datacatalog.worldbank.org)
This is why educational expenditure should not be conceptualized primarily as welfare expenditure. It is also long-duration productive investment.
A child who leaves school at fourteen may subsequently enter low-productivity employment. The immediate household gain may be a wage, reduced educational expenses or additional unpaid labour at home. But the country loses decades of potential productivity that might have emerged from greater educational attainment.
The loss is cumulative.
If one child loses an opportunity, the individual loss may appear modest in a national budget. If millions experience weaker schooling, lower secondary completion and limited access to technical or tertiary education, the aggregate effect becomes a constraint on the economy’s ability to move into more productive sectors.
8. India’s legal entitlement is narrower than its developmental ambition
India’s legal framework also reveals a structural tension.
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 provides for free and compulsory education for children from six to fourteen years of age. (indiacode.nic.in)
That is a significant constitutional and statutory achievement, but it does not establish a general statutory entitlement to free and compulsory education through age eighteen.
At the same time, the National Education Policy 2020 conceptualizes school education through a 5+3+3+4 structure covering ages 3–18 and states a policy goal of universal access and opportunity from pre-school through Grade 12. It explicitly identifies adequate infrastructure, regular trained teachers, upgrading existing government schools and expanding quality school provision as requirements for preventing dropout and restoring public-school credibility. (education.gov.in)
The contradiction is therefore not necessarily a legal inconsistency. It is a policy challenge:
India’s developmental strategy increasingly assumes education through adolescence, while its general statutory guarantee of free and compulsory education still ends at fourteen.
The distinction matters in a country where the transition from middle school to secondary school is precisely where economic, geographical and social pressures become more significant.
The position for children with benchmark disabilities is different: the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, as noted by the parliamentary committee, provides an entitlement to free education up to eighteen years. (ndtv.com)
9. Developed countries provide useful comparisons, but the comparison needs precision
It is broadly correct that many high-income countries maintain extensive publicly funded schooling through the teenage years, but it is not accurate to say that every developed country has an identical legal model of “free compulsory schooling until eighteen.”
The OECD’s comparative framework distinguishes between compulsory education, free education and the age at which young people may leave school, and these arrangements vary by country. (oecd.org)
England, for example, provides free state-school places for children aged 5–16. However, young people must remain in education or training until eighteen; after compulsory school age they can continue in full-time education, enter an apprenticeship or combine employment with part-time education or training. Government-funded institutions are not permitted to charge tuition fees to eligible students aged 16–18. (gov.uk)
France requires instruction from age three to sixteen, and public primary education is free. (service-public.fr)
The relevant lesson for India is therefore not that every developed country follows one identical template. It is that high-income systems generally do not regard the transition from fourteen to eighteen as the point at which the state simply withdraws from the educational capability of young people.
That is economically rational.
A teenager today faces an economy in which digital competence, basic financial literacy, communication, technical knowledge and the capacity for continual reskilling increasingly determine occupational opportunity. Leaving the educational system too early imposes a cost not only on the individual but also on the future labour market.
10. The real inequality is not private versus public; it is purchased advantage versus universal capability
There is a temptation to frame the issue as a conflict between private schools and government schools. That framing can distract from the deeper question.
Private schools are not inherently the problem. In a country of India’s scale, private educational provision can expand capacity, diversify pedagogical models and offer families choices. The problem arises when the quality of educational opportunity becomes strongly dependent on the purchasing power of parents.
The 2025 household expenditure survey makes the economic side of that divide explicit. Households spend far less, on average, when their children attend government schools than when they attend non-government schools. (mospi.gov.in)
At the same time, ASER demonstrates that public-school learning can improve significantly when interventions are well targeted. ASER 2024 recorded substantial recovery in government-school learning outcomes after the pandemic, including a rise from 38.5% to 44.8% in the share of Class V government-school children able to read a Class II-level text between 2022 and 2024. (asercentre.org)
This is crucial.
The public system is not condemned to mediocrity. The evidence demonstrates that it can change.
Consequently, the policy task is not to abolish private schools or to deny parental choice. It is to make the public system sufficiently strong that private schooling becomes a choice rather than an escape route from inadequate public provision.
11. What a serious reform programme would measure
A mature education policy would publish an annual national and state-level School Capability Index rather than concentrating principally on the number of schools constructed.
Such an index should measure, at minimum:
Access: distance, transport, enrolment, transition and completion through Class XII.
Human resources: teacher vacancies, pupil-teacher ratios, subject-teacher availability, teacher attendance, specialist teachers and counsellors.
Physical infrastructure: safe classrooms, laboratories, libraries, electricity, water, sanitation and maintenance.
Digital capability: functional computers, reliable internet, digital instructional resources and student digital literacy.
Learning: age-appropriate reading, mathematics, science, language and higher-order reasoning rather than merely examination pass rates.
Equity: outcomes by household income, gender, rural/urban location, caste and disability, with particular attention to transitions into secondary and higher-secondary education.
Affordability: household expenditure on uniforms, transport, books, coaching, examinations, devices and other costs that make a nominally free school expensive in practice.
Post-school capability: vocational participation, secondary completion, higher education transition, apprenticeship access and employment outcomes.
The purpose of such measurement would be to change incentives. A department should not receive political or administrative credit merely because a structure was sanctioned or constructed. Credit should depend increasingly on whether children can enter, remain, learn and progress.
12. The financing question: free schooling is only meaningful if the school is usable
India’s Union education allocation for 2026–27 was increased to approximately ₹1.39 lakh crore (about US$14.51 billion) for the Ministry of Education, including ₹83,562.26 crore (about US$8.72 billion) for the Department of School Education and Literacy. (education.gov.in)
But aggregate allocation alone does not establish adequacy.
Rajasthan offers an illustration. Recent reporting based on state data described a very large backlog of infrastructure requirements despite substantial budgetary allocations and recent expenditure on school construction and classrooms. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
This raises an essential distinction between allocation, expenditure and output.
A government can allocate money without spending it.
It can spend money without completing the intended infrastructure.
It can complete infrastructure without ensuring functionality.
And it can provide functional infrastructure without achieving learning.
The chain therefore has at least four stages:
Budget → execution → institutional capability → learning and completion.
Public accountability that stops at the first stage is inadequate.
The parliamentary committee’s finding that only ₹2.60 lakh (about US$2,714) of ₹482 lakh (about US$0.50 million) allocated in 2024–25 for the construction of 186 CwSN toilets had actually been utilised is an especially stark example of why budgetary announcements cannot substitute for implementation. (ndtv.com)
13. The economic case for universal secondary education
The strongest case for extending meaningful free public education through adolescence is therefore not sentimental. It is economic and institutional.
A country pays for inadequate education in several ways.
It pays through lower labour productivity.
It pays through weaker employability.
It pays through greater dependence on low-productivity informal employment.
It pays through reduced ability to adopt sophisticated technologies.
It pays through weaker entrepreneurial capability.
It pays through a narrower pool of technicians, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists, administrators and skilled tradespeople.
It pays through greater inequality because affluent households can compensate privately while poorer households cannot.
It pays again when adults who missed foundational learning require remedial programmes later in life.
And it pays through a loss of potential that can never be fully observed: inventions not made, businesses not created, technologies not developed, productivity improvements not discovered and professions not entered.
This is why the phrase “human capital” is more than economic jargon. A child is not simply another future worker; but the educational system is one of the institutions through which a society converts the latent capabilities of its population into productive, scientific, cultural and civic capacity.
14. What should happen after the parliamentary warning
The August 2026 parliamentary intervention should therefore be read as the beginning of a deeper policy debate, not merely as a demand for more buildings.
The first priority should be to ensure that every locality with a substantial school-going population has a credible path from primary through higher secondary education. The government should explicitly identify blocks and communities where the nearest secondary or higher-secondary institution is too distant or where transport creates a material barrier.
The second priority should be functional public-school quality. A school should not be counted as adequately provided merely because a building exists. Staffing, sanitation, electricity, laboratories, libraries, internet and accessibility should form part of the definition of an operational school.
The third priority should be targeted intervention in learning. Government schools require systematic remediation in reading, mathematics and science rather than assuming that age and grade progression automatically create knowledge.
The fourth priority should be adolescent retention. The transition into Classes IX–XII deserves more policy attention because this is where educational participation narrows most sharply. The official transition rate from secondary to higher secondary was only 75.1% nationally in 2024–25. (dsel.education.gov.in)
The fifth priority should be to reduce the hidden cost of “free” schooling. Transport, uniforms, books, digital devices, examinations, coaching and opportunity costs can all prevent attendance even when tuition fees are zero.
Finally, India should debate whether its general educational guarantee should eventually be extended beyond the present 6–14 statutory entitlement toward a stronger universal entitlement covering the years of adolescence. That would be a major policy decision requiring fiscal analysis, constitutional consideration, Centre–State coordination and implementation planning. But the economic logic behind the debate is clear: in a knowledge-intensive economy, fourteen is increasingly too early for the state to cease guaranteeing meaningful educational opportunity.
Conclusion: A school is an institution, not an entry in a database
The most important lesson from India’s latest education data is deceptively simple:
The number of schools is not the same thing as the amount of education a country provides.
A school without a building is not equivalent to a school with a safe building.
A school without a teacher is not equivalent to a functioning school.
A school without a laboratory is not equivalent to one capable of teaching practical science.
A school without accessible sanitation is not equivalent to an inclusive school.
A school without meaningful learning is not equivalent to an educational institution merely because children are registered on its rolls.
And a nominally free school that cannot provide a viable educational pathway through adolescence does not fully solve the economic problem of educational exclusion.
India has made substantial gains in elementary enrolment. ASER 2024 found that 98.1% of rural children aged 6–14 were enrolled in school, while UDISE+ records extensive national infrastructure coverage. These are real achievements and should not be minimized. (asercentre.org)
But the next phase is harder.
The country must move from schooling as access to schooling as capability.
That means ensuring that a child born into a poor household does not face a choice between an expensive private school and a public school with inadequate resources. It means treating secondary and higher-secondary education not as an optional extension for families who can afford it, but as part of the nation’s basic human-capital infrastructure.
The objective should not be to guarantee that every child merely has a place called a school.
The objective should be to guarantee that every child has a realistic opportunity to leave school at seventeen or eighteen with the literacy, numeracy, scientific understanding, digital competence, social capability and learning capacity required to participate in the modern economy and continue acquiring skills throughout life.
That is the difference between counting schools and educating a population.
And for a country seeking sustained productivity growth, technological advancement and a larger high-skill workforce, that difference is not administrative. It is developmental.
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