India must prevent the new education trap: India has nearly universal elementary school enrolment. That achievement can obscure a less reassuring development. A child may be enrolled and still find the route to a good education becoming harder to negotiate as public provision thins out in some places and families spend more to compensate.
There were 11.07 lakh government schools in 2014-15. By 2024-25, the number had fallen to 10.13 lakh. Private unaided recognised schools increased from 2.88 lakh to 3.39 lakh over the same period. NITI Aayog attributes much of the decline in government-school numbers to consolidation and rationalisation by states. Some consolidation is inevitable when enrolment falls or several tiny schools serve the same area. The sensible test is what happens to the child after the merger. A larger school with enough teachers is an improvement only if pupils can reach it without making attendance harder.
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This is where the idea of an education trap becomes useful. Economists use the term poverty trap for a condition in which one disadvantage makes escape from the next more difficult. Education can acquire a similar character. A weak local school induces a family to pay for tuition or private schooling. The additional expense reduces the margin available for later education. Competition for a limited number of good college seats then generates another bill for coaching. An examination failure can add another year of expense. Families with money absorb these shocks. Families without it surrender options.
Education has historically worked in the opposite direction in India. The expansion of government schools and public colleges gave able students from modest households a route into professional employment. That route was never equally open to everyone, but it widened opportunity on a scale few other public interventions managed.
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Public schooling still does the heavy lifting
The constitutional commitment was strengthened by the 86th Amendment in 2002 and the Right to Education Act that came into force in 2010. ASER 2024 found that 98.1% of rural children aged six to 14 were enrolled in school. India has, in other words, come a long way from the era when getting children into a classroom was itself the central challenge.
Learning remains uneven, although the recent evidence deserves more attention than it receives. Among Standard III pupils in rural government schools, the share able to read a Standard II text rose from 16.3% in 2022 to 23.4% in 2024. That was higher than the 2018 figure. Government schools also recorded a strong recovery in basic arithmetic.
This complicates the familiar argument that parents move to private schools because public schools are beyond repair. Public schools can improve. The harder administrative job is to make such improvement routine rather than episodic.
Parents, meanwhile, face a very large price difference. The National Statistical Office’s 2025 education survey estimated average household spending of ₹2,863 per student in government schools and ₹25,002 in non-government schools. Spending in recognised private unaided schools averaged ₹28,693. These are household expenses, not total social expenditure on schooling, but they show the size of the financial decision confronting a family that leaves the public system.
For an affluent household, choosing a private school can be a question of preference. For a family living close to its budget constraint, the condition of the government school decides how much of its income has to be diverted to education. When public provision deteriorates, that family pays for the deterioration.
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Rationalisation of schools and the education trap
India does have too many very small schools in some regions. Populations have shifted, fertility has fallen and enrolment patterns have changed. Maintaining a separate establishment for a handful of pupils can consume resources that might produce better results in a larger school nearby.
“Nearby” is doing considerable work in that proposition.
A school with 20 pupils is an inefficient unit from the perspective of the education department. For those 20 children, it can be the difference between walking to class and depending on transport that may not exist. The effect will vary sharply by geography. A merger in a town with regular buses is quite different from one in a tribal area or a sparsely populated hill district.
That is why counting schools closed or merged tells us less than either side of the debate assumes. The relevant data would track what happened to the pupils afterwards. Did attendance hold up? Did learning improve? Did travel time rise enough to affect retention? School rationalisation should be judged by those outcomes.
Teacher deployment reveals the same weakness in aggregate measures. UDISE+ 2025-26 reports better pupil-teacher ratios nationally. Yet 1,00,843 schools still operated with a single teacher. The number has fallen from 1,18,190 in 2022-23, which is progress. It remains a formidable administrative failure for a system that has more than one crore teachers.
A national pupil-teacher ratio can look comfortable while individual schools struggle to cover several classes with one teacher. Governments need to move teachers to where pupils actually are. That is politically harder than recruiting more teachers because transfers create winners and losers inside the system.
Scarcity turns examinations into high-stakes events
The financial burden grows as a child moves towards higher education. Good public institutions remain heavily oversubscribed. Their fees are generally lower than those of comparable private institutions, and employers often attach greater value to their degrees. Competition for admission is therefore intense.
This scarcity sustains the coaching industry. Parents are responding rationally to the odds their children face. When a small difference in an entrance score can determine access to a medical seat or a sought-after university course, families buy whatever preparation they can afford.
The examination authority then becomes part of the architecture of equal opportunity. If an entrance test is compromised, the loss is distributed very unevenly.
The cancellation of UGC-NET in June 2024 showed the problem in its starkest form. The education ministry said information received from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre indicated that the integrity of the examination might have been compromised. NEET-UG has also been hit by repeated controversy, and NTA records a nationwide NEET-UG re-examination on June 21, 2026.
Parliament has responded. The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Act, 2026 provides for faster investigation, fast-track courts and tougher punishment for organised malpractice. The Bill cleared both Houses in July and subsequently received presidential assent.
A harsher law can deter organised fraud. It cannot substitute for competent examination management. Paper security has to work before the examination. Errors in evaluation need swift correction afterwards. Candidates should not have to depend on litigation to establish whether a national examination has been conducted properly.
Repeated disruption also has a distributional effect. A student whose family can pay for another year of coaching can try again. Another student may need to take whatever course or job is immediately available. An administrative failure that formally treats all candidates alike can therefore leave poorer candidates worse off.
Universities cannot live on enrolment numbers
The same concern applies after admission. India has expanded higher education rapidly, but more seats do not automatically produce better education. The value of a university depends heavily on the people it appoints and the academic standards it is prepared to defend.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Gambhirdan K Gadhvi v State of Gujarat is relevant here. The Court set aside the appointment of the vice-chancellor of Sardar Patel University and held that applicable UGC regulations governing vice-chancellor appointments could not be disregarded. The ruling was subsequently cited by the Court in other university appointment cases.
University governance tends to attract less public attention than entrance examinations because its failures are harder to photograph and rarely inconvenience lakhs of students on a single day. Their effects accumulate over time. Poor appointments weaken departments, which affects the education of successive batches of students and eventually the standing of the institution itself.
India’s demographic dividend is often invoked as though youth were an economic resource in the same way as a mineral deposit. A large working-age population acquires value only when people become productive enough to earn more than the previous generation. Education is central to that conversion.
The country has spent decades widening access to schooling. It now has to protect the pathway that made education a means of mobility. A functioning government school gives a poor child a start without requiring a large cheque from the family. A fairly conducted entrance examination allows effort and ability to count for something. A credible public university can then convert that opportunity into a qualification with labour-market value.
When each stage requires private expenditure to compensate for a failure at the previous one, family income begins to determine how far a student can proceed. India would then have succeeded in expanding enrolment while weakening the economic purpose that made mass education worth pursuing in the first place.
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Dr Aruna Sharma is a New Delhi-based development economist. She is a 1982-batch Indian Administrative Service officer. She retired as steel secretary in 2018.