Decline in number of schools, teachers in Maharashtra but student enrolment up by 2.25 lakh: Report

At the state level, even though the number of secondary schools increased from 28,532 to 29,079 in the last year, the number of middle schools decreased from 29,445 to 29,252 and the number of foundational+preparatory schools decreased from 50,474 to 49,906.

However, student enrolment numbers in the state have increased by 2,25,904 compared to the previous year. In 2023-24 the enrolment of students across schools of all managements was 2.13 crore while in 2022-23 it was 2.11 crore. This is against the national trend which shows that student enrolment numbers dropped from 25.17 crore to 24.80 crore in the last year.

According to Professor Geeta Shinde, HOD of Savitribai Phule Pune University’s (SPPU) Education and Extension Department, the cluster school scheme could be the reason why the number of schools reduced. Cluster schools are formed by merging schools with less than 20 students with other schools within a 20-km radius. Additionally, she said that poor connectivity and lack of transportation in some areas may have led to the closure of schools.

Meanwhile, the number of teachers in Maharashtra has decreased. The 2023-24 report said that there were 7.38 lakh teachers in the state while in 2022-23 it recorded 7.42 lakh teachers, a decrease of 4,202 teachers.

“Over the past 15-20 years, there has been no state-wide teacher recruitment in Maharashtra. Although attempts were made to address this issue, many recruitment processes were marred by corruption. Additionally, many of the recruited teachers lack proficiency in the local language, contributing to a shortage of qualified educators,” said Shinde.

Computer facilities

As many as 70,075 or 64.7 per cent of the 1,08,237 schools in Maharashtra have functional desktops/PCs. This is a slight increase from the previous year when 63.7 per cent of schools in the state had access to computer facilities. Maharashtra performs better in this statistic compared to states like Uttar Pradesh (17.17%) and Madhya Pradesh (19.7%) but is surpassed by states like Kerala (69.9%), Punjab (92.2%), and Gujarat (70.4%).

The UDISE+ reports are based on voluntary uploading of data by schools having active UDISE+ codes in the respective academic years. For 2023-24, the cutoff date to submit data was March 31, 2024. UDISE was launched in 2012-13 and has been referred to as UDISE+ since 2018-19 when it began to be directly monitored by the Ministry of Education.