Learning deficit: India's education must focus on quality of outcomes

A new report by the NITI Aayog presents a comprehensive picture of India’s progress in school education, while also outlining a policy road map for improving quality. Major improvement in access to schooling and infrastructure has been witnessed over the past decade. Notably, electricity coverage in schools has risen from 55 per cent in 2014-15 to nearly 92 per cent in 2024-25. The enrolment of girls and students from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has improved. India now has about 1.5 million schools serving  around 247 million students, making it the world’s largest school-education network. Yet beneath these achievements lies a worrying reality. While children are attending school, learning outcomes have not necessarily improved. Despite improvement in recent years, only 27 per cent of the Grade 3 students surveyed can read a Grade 2-level text, while just 31 per cent of the Grade 5 students can solve a basic division problem. Proficiency in reading among the Grade 8 students has declined over the past decade, especially in government schools. Millions of children continue to move through the system without mastering foundational literacy and numeracy. Besides, the dropout rates in secondary schools remain high in several states, touching 20 per cent in West Bengal and over 18 per cent in Karnataka and Arunachal Pradesh. The transition from secondary to higher-secondary education continues to be a major point of attrition, with the national gross enrolment ratio at the level of higher-secondary education standing at only 58.4 per cent.

 

There are other structural weaknesses. Around 100,000 schools, or 7 per cent of the total, operate with a single teacher, and nearly 89 per cent of these are in rural areas. Furthermore, only about half the government secondary schools have laboratories. Teacher shortages remain acute, especially in states such as Bihar and Jharkhand. More worrying is the finding that only 10-15 per cent of the teachers score above 60 per cent in competency tests for the subjects they teach. Nearly 14 per cent of the teaching days are also lost to non-academic duties such as surveys, elections and administrative work. In this context, the report rightly observes that India can no longer focus only on enrolment and infrastructure. The next phase must be about learning quality. For years, policy concentrated on bringing children into classrooms. That goal was necessary and largely successful. But schooling alone does not guarantee education. A child who spends years in school but cannot read fluently, understand a passage, or solve simple mathematics is being failed by the system. As the report argues, there is a need to shift from rote learning and textbook completion to foundational mastery, competency-based assessment, and teaching aligned with learning levels.

 

Crucially, the study also dispels the myth that private schools automatically provide better education. In many private schools, children struggle with reading comprehension and arithmetic despite parents paying higher fees in the hope of better outcomes. Equally important is the report’s warning about digital inequality. Though artificial intelligence, digital classrooms, and future-ready skills have assumed importance, digital tools cannot compensate for weak foundational learning. Without strong basics, digitisation may deepen educational inequality, instead of reducing it. As India aspires to become a developed country by 2047, the quality of its human capital will become central to achieving the goal.