Opinion Low enrolment in schools and Budget 2026: Why school mergers will disproportionately impact the poor

Any assessment of rationalisation must begin with the scale and condition of government schooling. Parliamentary data placed on record by the Ministry of Education show that in 2024–25, India had 10.13 lakh functional government schools, enrolling 12.15 crore students and employing 51.49 lakh teachers. In the same year, 3.39 lakh private schools enrolled around 9.5 crore students. While these figures underline the continuing centrality of government schools, they also conceal significant internal stress.

One visible concern is low enrolment. As many as 65,054 government schools reported 10 or fewer students, and 5,149 recorded zero enrolment in 2024–25. Despite having no students, these schools collectively employed around 1.44 lakh teachers. These figures form the immediate policy context within which rationalisation has been advanced as an efficiency-oriented response, aimed at redeploying teachers and consolidating infrastructure.

School rationalisation — defined as merging or temporarily closing low-enrolment schools — has been pursued across states for over a decade. In 2014–15, India had 11.07 lakh functional government schools. Since then, nearly 93,779 schools have been merged or rationalised. The stated objectives include improving retention, correcting uneven staffing, and making better use of public resources. However, enrolment trends cast doubt on whether these objectives have been realised.

Government school enrolment declined from 13.62 crore in 2022-23 to 12.15 crore in 2024–25, a cumulative fall of about 10.7 per cent in three years. During the same period, the number of low-enrolment government schools rose by over 24 per cent. In contrast, private schools expanded steadily: Enrolment rose from 7.92 crore in 2014-15 to 9.58 crore in 2024–25, alongside an increase in the number of institutions. While demographic change and parental preferences play a role, the persistence of declining enrolment alongside rationalisation suggests that consolidation alone has not restored confidence in government schooling.

These trends must be read through the constitutional lens of Article 21A, which guarantees the right to free and compulsory education for children aged 6–14. In practice, the merger or closure of neighbourhood schools often increases the distance children must travel, raising direct costs such as transport and indirect costs related to time, supervision, and safety. These costs act as informal barriers to access and fall disproportionately on poorer households. Although the Ministry has stated that travel allowance and escort facilities are provided under the integrated SSA, such measures offer only partial mitigation. Neighbourhood school norms vary widely across states — from 1 km in Gujarat to 1.5 km in Himachal Pradesh — making the burden uneven and difficult to offset uniformly. Rationalisation thus alters the spatial logic of the right itself, shifting the burden of access from the state to households.

This access stress is reflected in the fiscal architecture of Budget 2026–27. While allocations for the Department of School Education and Literacy (Rs 83,562 crore) and Samagra Shiksha (Rs 42,100 crore) show modest growth, the Budget does not earmark resources to systematically address the transport, safety, and supervision costs generated by school mergers. At the same time, rising allocations for centrally administered institutions — such as PM SHRI schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas, and Navodaya Vidyalayas — signal a shift towards concentrated models of quality rather than reinvestment in neighbourhood government schools.

The welfare implications of this fiscal and administrative reorientation are equally significant. Government schools remain the primary platform through which the state delivers PM POSHAN, free textbooks and uniforms, scholarships, hostels, and health interventions — benefits not extended to private schools. When children move out of government schools, poorer households risk losing both free education and the enabling provisions that sustain attendance and learning. Beyond material support, government schools perform an essential social function as spaces of integration and support for first-generation learners. Their contraction, therefore, represents not merely an administrative adjustment, but a dilution of a constitutional right whose effective realisation depends on proximity, inclusion, and sustained public investment.

Read alongside the Budget 2026–27, this raises a fundamental question about the trajectory of public education: Will policy prioritise selective islands of excellence or strengthen the neighbourhood schools that anchor universal access and equity?

Bendre is a senior research associate at the MIT School of Government, Pune. Karthik K R is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at KITLV-Leiden and a research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London