Benches used to support a crumbling roof at a school in Darbhanga in Bihar, as 191 children face safety concerns
A recent, much-publicised NITI Aayog report, School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement, has opened up a Pandora’s box. The number of government schools fell from 11.07 lakh in 2014–15 to 10.13 lakh in 2024–25, a net reduction of approximately 94,000. That amounts to an average net decline of about 25 schools a day.
Where did the schools go?
Technically speaking, it does not mean that 25 schools were physically closed every day, or that 94,000 separate institutions were formally shut down. The figure includes changes associated with consolidation and rationalisation.
The case for consolidation is not without merit. Falling enrolment, migration and declining school-age populations can make some institutions difficult to sustain. Schools with very few pupils may struggle with teacher availability and the provision of adequate facilities. Merging them with better-equipped institutions could improve teaching, provide access to libraries and laboratories, and allow more effective deployment of staff and funds.
But these are potential benefits, not proof of results. If the state has reduced its school network in the name of efficiency, it must demonstrate what children have gained in return. Closing it may improve administrative efficiency, but does it improve education?
The test is whether the receiving school delivers better teaching and learning without making education harder to access. A larger institution may offer more facilities, but those advantages mean little to a six-year-old who must walk several kilometres to reach it, or to a girl whose family considers the journey unsafe.
The National Education Policy 2020 recognises the need for careful school rationalisation, with due regard to access. The Ministry of Education has also stated in parliamentary replies that decisions to open, merge or close schools fall within the jurisdiction of state governments and Union Territory administrations. Those authorities must explain which schools disappeared, why they were selected and what happened to their pupils.
What happens when the nearest school closes?
Consider a hypothetical village where a government primary school has 25 pupils. The education department decides to merge it with a larger school three kilometres away, arguing that the receiving institution has better facilities and can deploy teachers more efficiently.
On paper, the decision may look sensible. The village school has few pupils; the larger institution has more classrooms and a wider range of facilities. But what happens on the morning after the merger?
A child who previously walked five minutes to school may now have to walk 40 minutes each way. The route may involve a busy road, an isolated stretch or a river crossing. There may be no school bus, and the family may be unable to afford private transport. During the monsoon, the journey could become longer or impassable.
The additional burden may be manageable for an older child but difficult for a six-year-old. A child with a disability may find the journey impossible without assistance. Parents concerned about safety may decide that a daughter should remain at home, particularly if the new route is isolated or requires her to travel without an escort.
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, provides an important legal benchmark. Section 6 requires the appropriate government and local authority to establish a school within prescribed neighbourhood limits where one does not exist. The Central RTE Rules specify a neighbourhood distance of one kilometre for Classes I–V and three kilometres for Classes VI–VIII, while state rules and provisions for difficult terrain and other circumstances also need to be considered.
A merger does not automatically violate the right to education. But the authorities must examine the applicable rules and establish whether the replacement arrangement provides meaningful access.
The distance must also be measured in practical terms. A map may show that the receiving school is two kilometres away, but a child may have to travel much farther because of a river, a railway line, poor roads or the absence of a safe crossing.
For the child, the relevant measure is not the distance between two points on a map. It is the journey that must be made every school day.
The impact on girls, children with disabilities, Scheduled Tribe communities, Scheduled Caste communities and low-income households deserves particular attention. These groups may face different barriers, and their experiences should not be collapsed into a single category.
The missing link: what happened to the children?
The most important evidence is not the number of buildings removed from the official count. It is the subsequent educational history of the children who attended them.
When a school is merged, the administration may record the transfer of its pupils to another institution. That establishes an administrative action, not necessarily a successful educational outcome.
Did those children enrol in the receiving school? Did they attend regularly? Did they continue into the next academic year? Did their learning improve? Did any leave the system altogether?
If pupils have been transferred to better-equipped schools and continue to attend regularly, the merger may have achieved its purpose. If some children have disappeared from school registers, the investigation must establish why. If the records cannot trace transferred pupils, that would expose a weakness in monitoring, although it would not, by itself, prove that those children had dropped out.
The test is simple: the government should be able to account for the educational destination of the children affected by its decisions.
Has learning improved?
The wider evidence on learning makes the question more pressing. ASER 2024 found that 23.4 per cent of rural Class III children enrolled in government schools could read a Class II-level text. The figure had been 16.3 per cent in 2022. Among Class V children in government schools, the proportion able to read a Class II-level text rose from 38.5 per cent in 2022 to 44.8 per cent in 2024.
These figures, reported in ASER 2024 and reflected in NITI Aayog’s analysis, show a recovery in foundational reading skills. They also reveal how much ground remains to be covered. In 2024, more than three-quarters of rural Class III children in government schools could not read a text at the Class II level, while more than half of Class V children could not do so.
The improvement matters. It shows that government-school learning outcomes are not static and that progress is possible. It also cautions against portraying the public school system as uniformly deteriorating.
But these national findings do not tell us whether school consolidation has improved learning. They cover children in rural government schools generally, not a cohort of pupils whose schools were merged.
That distinction is crucial. The evidence needed to judge consolidation must compare the outcomes of children in merged schools with those of comparable pupils in schools that remained open.
Did the receiving school have more teachers? Did class sizes rise? Were subject teachers available? Did reading and arithmetic proficiency improve after the merger? Were gains sustained over several years?
The central issue is not whether a consolidated school has better infrastructure. It is whether the children transferred to it receive a demonstrably better education.
A shrinking network, a changing system
The decline in school numbers has coincided with a fall in overall school enrolment and a change in the distribution of pupils between government and private institutions.
NITI Aayog’s analysis records a fall in total school enrolment from 26.95 crore in 2014–15 to 24.69 crore in 2024–25. It also shows that the government-school share of enrolment declined over the decade while private unaided schools increased their share.
These trends raise questions about the changing role of the public school system. But they do not establish that closures caused the decline in government school enrolment. Demographic change, migration, parental preferences and perceptions of school quality may all contribute.
Where government schools have lost pupils to private institutions, the reasons should be examined rather than assumed. Have parents moved their children because of better teaching, English-medium instruction, facilities or perceptions of quality? Have demographic changes reduced the number of children in the area? Have government-school closures themselves made private institutions the only practical alternative?
The answers may differ from one locality to another. The same scrutiny must extend beyond primary education. UDISE+ 2024–25 records a gross enrolment ratio of 78.7 per cent at secondary level and 58.4 per cent at higher secondary level. These figures point to continuing challenges in educational participation as children progress through the system.
They do not establish that primary-school consolidation caused the gaps. But they reinforce the need to examine whether children have a continuous and accessible pathway from primary school through secondary and higher secondary education.
For a child in a remote village, the nearest primary school may be within walking distance, while the secondary school is much farther away. If the local primary school closes, the additional journey may complicate attendance from the beginning of the child’s education. The consequences may become more severe as the child grows older and faces longer journeys to higher classes.
A school network must therefore be assessed as a connected system, not merely as a count of individual institutions.
Efficiency argument must be tested
School consolidation is often justified by the more efficient use of public money and personnel. The claim deserves a proper financial assessment.
If closing a school reduces expenditure on buildings and administration but requires additional transport, more classrooms and extra staff at the receiving institution, the net savings may be smaller than anticipated. If the receiving school cannot accommodate the additional pupils, the merger may produce overcrowding or undermine the very improvements it was intended to deliver.
Conversely, if a merger allows a state to deploy teachers more effectively, improve facilities and raise learning outcomes while ensuring that children can reach school safely, it may be justified.
What must the government prove?
The reduction of nearly 94,000 government schools over a decade is a significant change in India’s public education infrastructure. It is not, by itself, proof of a national failure. Nor is the official explanation of consolidation sufficient to establish success.
The government must demonstrate that the process has improved educational outcomes without imposing unreasonable barriers on children.
That requires evidence on five fronts: whether the receiving schools are better equipped and staffed; whether learning outcomes have improved; whether transferred pupils continue to attend; whether journeys remain safe and manageable; and whether the financial gains justify the costs borne by families and the public system. Which of these outcomes has occurred, and how often?
If the state has closed or merged schools to improve education, it must show that the children affected are better off. If it cannot, the question is no longer merely why the school count has fallen. It is whether the country has mistaken administrative economy for educational progress.
