School Education

Two Acts framed the decade before 2014: the Right to Education Act, 2009 made schooling a fundamental right for children aged 6 to 14, and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan put a school within reach of nearly every village. Access was largely solved; quality was not. Swachh Bharat: Swachh Vidyalaya (2014-15) built toilets in every government school in a single year. In 2018 the school schemes were merged into Samagra Shiksha, one integrated programme from pre-primary to higher secondary. Then in July 2020 the National Education Policy replaced the 1986 policy and restructured schooling itself, from 10+2 to 5+3+3+4 — three years of pre-school, then foundational, preparatory, middle and secondary stages built around how children actually develop.

In 2024-25 the number of school teachers crossed one crore for the first time since UDISE+ began — 1,01,22,420, up 6.7% in two years. The effect shows in the pupil-teacher ratio, now 10 at the foundational stage and 21 at secondary, both well inside the National Education Policy's 1:30 recommendation. In the same year single-teacher schools fell to 104,125 and schools with zero enrolment dropped by 38%, as states used the individual-student data to move teachers where the children actually were. In 2025-26 the number of teachers rose to 1,02,73,020, single-teacher schools fell to 100,843 and zero-enrolment schools to 5,663.

The policy runs on four tracks. Foundations: NIPUN Bharat (July 2021) targets reading and arithmetic by Class 3 by 2026-27; Vidya Pravesh has given 4.2 crore Grade 1 entrants a 12-week play-based start across 8.9 lakh schools; over 1.1 crore children are enrolled in Balvatikas. Teachers: 12.97 lakh have been trained on foundational literacy and numeracy under NISHTHA. Exemplars: PM SHRI puts ₹27,360 crore into upgrading more than 14,500 existing schools into models that implement NEP in full, chosen by a competitive Challenge Method — 12,084 had been selected across 32 States and UTs by the end of 2024. Measurement: the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan replaced the old National Achievement Survey, testing 21.15 lakh students in Grades 3, 6 and 9 on 4 December 2024.

This page charts internet access rather than enrolment for a reason. In 2022-23 UDISE+ moved from school-level returns to individual student records, and the Ministry of Education states plainly that its data "is not strictly comparable with previous reports on various educational indicators like GER, NER, Dropout rates". So no honest line runs from 2014 to 2025 for enrolment or dropout — the counting method changed underneath. Facility counts were never student-record based, which is why they survive the break. The chart still covers only four years: the share of schools with internet was 22.3% in 2019-20, but 2020-21 and 2021-22 were published as counts of schools rather than percentages, and turning those into a percentage would be our arithmetic rather than the Ministry's figure. Two further numbers belong here rather than buried: secondary-stage retention was 51.9% in 2025-26, up from 47.2% a year earlier but still only just over half, which the Ministry links partly to how many schools offer secondary grades at all; and while Class III reading is at its highest since 2005, 23.4% means most children of that age still cannot read a Grade II text. The direction is the achievement; the level is the work left.

NIPUN Bharat's deadline for universal foundational literacy and numeracy is 2026-27, the same year PM SHRI finishes its five-year funding cycle — so the next two years are when both are judged. The measurement system is now in place to do that judging: PARAKH surveys every few years, individual student records in UDISE+, and the Holistic Progress Card replacing marksheets with a fuller picture of each child. The unfinished items are visible in the same tables as the progress: 58.2% of schools had ramps and handrails in 2025-26, and secondary retention needs to rise a long way before the policy's goal of universal enrolment by 2030 is in reach.