Bihar succeeds, and slips, in closing school education gap with Kerala

Bihar is retaining teachers and reducing dropout rates but needs to improve school enrolment

For decades, Bihar and Kerala have stood at the two poles of India’s school education story: The former is held up as a cautionary tale, the other as a benchmark. It is a contrast so often repeated that it is rarely examined. The more interesting question isn’t which state is ahead, but how the gap between them is closing, and where it refuses to.

 

India has one of the world’s largest education systems, spanning more than 1.47 million schools, 10.3 million teachers and 247.2 million students, who are from vastly different social and economic backgrounds. Bihar and Kerala sit at opposite ends of that system’s ledger. Kerala has a literacy rate of 95.3 per cent, having secured near-complete school enrolment for its children decades ago. Bihar’s literacy rate stands at 74.3 per cent.

 

The latest data from the Unified District Information System for Education Plus tells a layered story: Bihar is catching up with Kerala on two fronts — retaining teachers in classrooms and reducing dropout rates, even as the gap between them on enrolment itself is growing wider.

 

Bihar’s gross enrolment ratio is falling; it has dropped below where it stood eight years ago. From 57.7 per cent in 2018-19 academic year, the ratio slipped to 53.1 per cent in 2025-26, even though the state performed well during the pandemic years, with enrolment rising above 60 per cent. Kerala has never slipped off the high 90s, touching 99.4 per cent in 2025-26. The enrolment ratio gap between the two states has widened, from 40.3 percentage points in 2018-19 to 46.3 points now, even as the national average kept rising. 

 

The pupil-teacher ratio tells an encouraging story about Bihar. After years of overcrowded classrooms with more than 50 students per teacher from 2018-19 to 2022-23, the ratio began improving after 2023-24 and has held at better levels since. The gap between the two states, which had widened to 40 students per teacher in the post-pandemic years, has since narrowed sharply to just 11 in 2025-26. 

 

Dropout rates follow a similar trend. Bihar’s rate fell below the national average in 2024-25 and stayed there the following year — the first time in at least seven years that this has happened. Its gap with Kerala, which had widened to 22.8 percentage points in 2022-23, narrowed sharply to 2.1 percentage points in 2024-25, before edging up marginally the following year. 

 

Bihar allocated 20 per cent of its total expenditure to education in FY26, the highest share among major states. Yet on a per-capita basis, it remains among the lowest spenders in the country. Smaller classrooms and fewer dropouts show the money is reaching schools. But fewer children enrolling means it isn’t yet reaching the families who need convincing to send them to school. The enrolment gap may owe to several reasons: Children being forced out of school to earn extra income for the family, or simply because the nearest high school is too far away. For a state with one of India’s youngest populations, closing that education gap isn’t optional.