Down the learning curve: Govt schools need greater accountability

The latest findings of the National Statistics Office’s Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education have underlined the well-known fact that the government-schooling system is failing, a development that has a bearing on demographic trends. The survey reveals a decline in attendance in government schools in rural and urban areas since 2017-18. The decline was worryingly sharp in rural India, with a nearly 10 percentage-point drop in the number of higher-secondary students attending government schools from 68 per cent to 58.9 per cent in 2025. In urban areas, the drop was smaller from 38.9 per cent to 36.4 per cent. New enrolment, too, has fallen across all levels — primary, middle, and secondary — with the sharpest fall recorded in the first two cohorts.

 

The striking point about this exodus from government schools is that private education is not cheap. The survey shows that average education expenses in government schools are a fraction of what parents spend on educating their children in private schools. In rural India, the disparity is seven times. Ironically, evidence suggests that private schools are not necessarily imparting a higher standard of education. The survey revealed that roughly 27 per cent of students took private coaching — 31 per cent in urban areas and 25.5 per cent in rural areas. This substantial shift from government to expensive private schooling could partly be viewed as the result of growing relative prosperity and smaller families, which enable more Indians to send their children to what they perceive as superior private schools, though many private schools are known for extractive practices in terms of providing textbooks, uniforms, and so on.   

But the steadily deteriorating standard of government schools has played a key role in providing the impetus for this preference. The basic problem lies in the systemic lack of accountability, which translates into poor infrastructure and variable teaching standards. Nowhere is this more evident than in the level of teacher absenteeism. Teachers in government schools in India are among the best-paid in the developing world, especially after the Sixth and Seventh Pay Commissions. Yet nationwide surveys reveal that teacher absenteeism can be as high as 25 per cent — in some states it can be as high as 46 per cent. Adding to the problem of teachers not doing their job is the high level of vacancies in government schools. This is rarely an issue in private schools though salaries may not necessarily be higher, nor linked to pensions and other benefits.

 

One long-term result of this divergence between private and public education is growing social inequality. The shift to higher fee-paying private schooling by those who can afford it means that the government-schooling system, with all its deepening infirmities, will be limited to poorer and marginalised sections of society. Their emergence from a grossly underperforming education system will push them further out of better-paid employment opportunities and trap them in minimum-wage jobs. State schooling has been one of the cornerstones of the success of the Asian Tigers and China. By receding from the field, the government is doing its people a disservice.