Govt School Enrollments Fall by Over 87 Lakh: Education Minister Attributes Falling Number to New Monitoring System

Admission at Indian government schools has witnessed a whopping decrease, with over 87 lakh students less being reported in the academic year 2023–24 compared to the previous year. This was exposed in a Lok Sabha on Monday, when Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan replied to the MPs' questions Sougata Ray and Kishori Lal.

While, the Minister cautioned against reading the decline as wrong, as the sharp fall has to do with a paradigm change in gathering data and not actual dropouts.

"There has been a complete change from gross enrolment data to student-wise student data from 2022–23 onwards. That makes year-on-year comparison statistically inconsistent," Pradhan said.

It has followed from recommendations made in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which have led India's school data system to be overhauled. With this overhaul, the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) began collecting exact, student-level data from the 2022–23 academic years, replacing the conventional, bulk-data approach.

Although the new system guarantees more accurate, open, and transparent records, the wide disparity in published figures has run a shiver down the spine of the education industry. Experts point out that the downturn can be an indication of true issues such as higher dropout, shift in preference to private schools, or institutions underreporting because they are still adapting to the digital upgrade.

To pre-empt any such bitterness, the government still lays thrust on the push under the Samagra Shiksha scheme, disbursing over ₹34,45,820 lakh to states and UTs for 2024–25 for retaining schools and infrastructure.

Even as India adopts tech-enabled accountability in education, the challenge is clear: making sure that information reforms don't cloud ground realities at least for some time. Till then, educationists appeal to the government to dig deeper into the reasons why the decline happened and make sure the students are not merely names in an ecosystem—but learners in a classroom.