Fifty-one-year-old Mohammed Mafik was lynched to death by right-wing goons. His crime: Mafik’s son, Hafeez, went to audit a government school as part of the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) Fix the Schools Campaign. Will this chilling murder deter a horizontal expansion of this movement? Or will the CJP perfect its strategy revolving around basic points – drinking water and toilet facilities, usable classrooms, campus safety, midday meals and teacher attendance?
I’m not keeping my expectations too high. But the best thing about watching young volunteers move from school to school to document what ails the government schools across the country, post video reels and citizens quipping in with long pent-up grievances is that, for the first time, as a nation, we are finally having some meaningful conversations about an issue that is intrinsically important for the health and progress of the country and its society – one that has been ignored as frivolous for far too long. No nation progresses if its teeming millions remain illiterate or receive sub-standard education in undignified campuses.
What ails schools in India is not a secret. It was never considered a priority area, and it has been silently caving in as every Indian policy debate on education has drifted, almost by reflex, to seats of higher education – colleges, universities, IITs, IIMs and Medical Colleges.
Petty vote bank politics in the last two decades has led to colleges sprouting up virtually like community centres in every mohalla, the creation of more universities and now a race for IITs and AIIMS. More does not essentially mean better. Much worse, more has meant that schools are winding up. When colleges were first announced in the decade of 2000 without campuses, they were huddled in existing higher secondary school buildings, leading to a further strain on the already meagre school infrastructure. The pyramid has become even more inverted with the schools merging or shutting down, ostensibly as part of what the government calls a process of ‘rationalisation’.
Primary schools are shutting down. Schools are vanishing. So are the students, even as the enrollment is higher. Students may be in at the gate but are also out faster – much before the learning process can be completed.
The statistics alone are glaring. 89,441 government schools shut between 2014-15 and 2023-24, even as private schools grew by roughly 43,000 in the same window. Gujarat alone shut 5,000 government schools and saw a 341 percent surge in dropouts since 2020, many of them girls, married off once the nearest school becomes an unwalkable distance away. Uttar Pradesh shuttered 10,000 schools and merged 29,000 more. Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, Jharkhand and half a dozen other states show the identical pattern.
A parliamentary Committee on Estimates report tabled this month found that nearly 73 percent of students drop out before completing higher secondary school. India runs over 9 lakh primary schools but barely 90,866 offering Classes 11–12. This is where the dropout rate begins peaking. 6.18 crore children in primary school shrink to just 1.64 crore by higher secondary.
These numbers wouldn’t look so sad if the schools that survive were functioning with remarkable standards. On the contrary, what survives is often barely functional. Over a lakh schools nationwide are run on a single teacher. In Gujarat, projected by the Modi government as a model state, more than 1,600 primary schools have one person teaching every class from 1 to 8.
The CJP has focused on the issue of school infrastructure. What is missed out is the level of learning that is often masked by the annual pass-outs that reveal a working system. CBSE’s Class 10 pass rate this year was 93.7 percent, Class 12 was 85.2 percent. But survey after survey has flagged the ground reality. ASER 2024 found that only 23 percent of Class 3 in government schools can read a Class 2-level paragraph. The government's own PARAKH survey found 54 percent of Class 6 students cannot compare whole numbers.
We wouldn’t really need surveys to point us to these gaps. Our daily life and interactions with people educated in government schools glaringly expose how even a matriculate can barely read a paragraph or manage simple calculations.
Combined education spending has stuck near 2.7 percent of GDP for years, which is much less than the 6 percent promised since the 1966 Kothari Commission. Within that shrinking pie, Budget 2026 raised higher education funding by 11 percent against 6.35 percent for schools.
The education system is severely underfed, and what should have been the base of this pyramid – schools - is completely undernourished. The 2025-26 Economic Survey rolls out PISA-style testing and NIRF-style school rankings, but it concedes that secondary-level enrollment is barely half the eligible age group. This is A-class diagnostics for a patient nobody wants to feed.
The pyramid has happily been inverted for a long time and will collapse. If the quality and quantity of school education remain poor, what would be the future of higher institutes of learning? The signs are already visible. Universities and colleges are repeatedly revealing low, even zero enrollment in some courses. Nearly a third of undergraduate seats in engineering colleges were vacant between 2019 and 2024.
How far would the CJP’s campaign be successful in building the momentum to restore the schools to their foundational place in the pyramid, and would that foundation be eventually replenished and strengthened? The system has been broken for a long time before it started deteriorating, and to set it right needs a revolutionary zeal, besides vision and persistence.
The beginning is good, at least: focused public conversations and finally a nationwide acknowledgement that something is rotten about school affairs. And, that’s not a small achievement.
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