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. Niti Aayog flags poor student retention, learning outcomes in reportStatewide, 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. UDISE+ 2025-26: Key takeaways in graphicsThe 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 eff