In a Social Media Post, former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot shared, “It is extremely alarming that more than 8.4 lakh school dropouts have occurred in just two years under the BJP government in Rajasthan. For the first time in history, enrolment in private schools has surpassed that in government schools. This is direct proof of the declining reputation of the state’s government schools”.
Gehlot’s post went on to say, “Look at the irony: during this period, the number of teachers increased from 7.8 lakh to more than 7.9 lakh, yet due to mismanagement, government schools have lost more than 9.3 lakh students. Today in Rajasthan, it’s not just the roofs of schools that are collapsing, but the long-standing public trust in the government education system is also crumbling. Assigning non-educational tasks to teachers, crumbling school infrastructure, stalled repairs, and the continuous politicization of the curriculum instead of reforms in education—these are the causes of this downfall. When the Education Minister’s attention shifts away from education to everything else, this is the situation that was bound to arise…”
An analysis of UDISE+ NEP-structure reports for 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26 released recently shows total enrolment from foundational to secondary level at 24.7 crore in 2025-26, compared with 24.8 crore in 2023-24 – a decline of about 8.3 lakh. But within this nearly flat headline number, enrolment in govt schools fell from 12.8 crore to 11.9 crore, while that in private unaided recognised schools rose from 9 crore to 9.9 crore.
But are private schools really gaining students at the cost of government schools, reshaping who studies where in India’s classrooms? While overall school enrolment has held broadly steady over two years, government schools lost nearly 86 lakh students between 2023-24 and 2025-26, even as private unaided recognised schools added over 88 lakh of them.
Prof. Arun C Mehta a former Professor of NIEPA, New Delhi, who nurtured UDISE for over 15 years says, “ Between 2022 and 2025, something remarkable and largely unnoticed happened in Indian classrooms: the school system stopped losing children. While headlines focused on a decline in total enrolment to nearly 5 million students, the deeper story revealed by the latest UDISE+ phase-specific reports is one of historic success”.
National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration is a research focused university set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (now known as the Ministry of Education. Prof Mehta says, “The drop in numbers – from 251.8 million children in 2022–23 to 246.9 million in 2024-25 – is not a failure. It is simply the long-predicted echo of India’s falling birth rate. Fewer babies born after 2016 are now reaching school age, and the contraction is clearly visible in pre-primary, Balvatika, and the early primary classes”.
The surprise is what happened next: almost none of these fewer children are slipping away. Once a child crosses the threshold of Grade 1 today, the system holds on to them with unprecedented tenacity. Annual dropout rates, long the Achilles’ heel of Indian education, have collapsed. At the elementary level (Grades 3–5), dropout has declined from 8.7% to just 2.3%. In middle school (Grades 6–8), it has more than halved, from 8.1% to 3.5%. Even at secondary level (Grades 9–10), historically the point of maximum leakage, the annual dropout rate has fallen from 13.8 % to 8.2 % in just three years – one of the steepest reductions ever recorded at this scale anywhere in the World. The traditional breaking points have been sealed. The transition from Grade 2 to Grade 3 is now virtually universal at 98.6 %. The once-feared jump from Grade 5 to Grade 6 has risen to 92.2 %.
