The recently released ‘school Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement’ report of NITI Aayog, the BJP/NDA government’s public policy think- tank, is acknowledgement by this institution which replaced the Planning Commission in 2015, that in its 12 years in power at the Centre and in several major states of the Gangetic plain, the ruling dispensation has done little to reform the public (government) school system. It confirms what your editors have been shouting from the rooftops for the past 26 years — the country’s public K-12 education system is hobbled by poor infrastructure, teacher shortages, weak governance, and dismal student learning outcomes.

According to the report, India hosts 1.47 million schools with a massive aggregate enrollment of 247 million children — the world’s largest school-going cohort. Yet improved access and a primary school enrollment of 91 percent have not translated into improved literacy and lower dropouts percentage. This in-house report of the government states that 98,592 of schools — mainly government — countrywide lack functional girls’ toilets; 61,540 have no usable toilets at all; 59,829 don’t provide hand-wash facilities; 119,000 are without electricity; 518,910 don’t provide computers and 536,550 don’t have internet connection. These foundational infrastructure deficiencies make the rhetoric of Viksit Bharat and a $30 trillion GDP economy goal by 2047, when India will celebrate its centenary of independence, sound hollow.

Teacher shortage is flagged as a major “bottleneck”. India employs 10.1 million teachers, but “significant shortfalls in teacher availability continue to affect the delivery of quality education, particularly in rural and underserved regions,” says the NITI Aayog report, highlighting that 7 percent of all schools — 104,000 — are served by only one teacher. The report also confirms that over half of routinely promoted class V children can’t read class II texts and 69 percent can’t solve simple division sums.

Meanwhile, parents — even from financially stressed bottom-of-the-pyramid households — are voting with their feet.  The report admits that government school enrolment has fallen from 71 percent in 2005 to 49.24 percent in 2024-25, with fees-levying (mostly budget private) schools now teaching 48 percent of all school-going children.

Curiously, in its elaborate 204-page report, the wiseacres of NITI Aayog are conspicuously silent about ways and means to finance their unexceptionable recommendations. For over seven decades, annual government expenditure (Centre plus states) on human capital development, i.e, education, has averaged a mere 3.5 percent of GDP cf. the minimum 6 percent of GDP recommended by the Kothari Commission in 1967, and reiterated by NEP 2020. Detailed policy prescription reports and ambitious targets will remain little more than well-intentioned rhetoric if not backed up with need-based budgetary outlays.