‘Enrolment in schools dipped by 3.3mn in 10 years’ – Times of India

The school-going population declined from 254.8 million in 2012-13, the year when the unified district information system for education (UDISE) was initiated, to 250 million in 2019-20, the latest year for which data is available.

“Overall enrolment has been falling at all levels for almost a decade, whether primary, elementary or overall I to XII enrolment. The decline in enrolment is much higher than the decline in child population,” said Arun Mehta, former professor of NIEPA and author of the research paper, “Is decline in school enrolment in India a cause of concern?…Yes, it is”.
Mehta said one of the problem points was that “instead of trying to explain the steady slide, the government has announced improvement by citing the 2018-19 enrolment data which is the lowest enrolment fell to in a decade”.

The last decade saw the highest enrolment in 2015-16, when it touched 260.6 million, and the lowest in 2018-19, when it dropped to 248.3 million. The government has focused on how total enrolment increased by 2.6 million in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19. In reality, enrolment in grades I to XII in 2019-20 was less than that in all other years since 2012-13, barring 2018-19.

Curiously, 2019-20 saw an increase in enrolment over 2018-19 despite a steep fall in the number of schools covered by UDISE that year. The number fell by 43,292, compared to 2018-19, the biggest decline in the number of schools covered since 2012-13. The sharpest decline has been in schools run by the department of education, a reduction of over 50,000 schools, offset by an increase in the number of private schools.

This reduction in the coverage of government schools under UDISE+ is generally believed to be due to the merger and closure of thousands of schools for “consolidation and rationalisation of schools” under Niti Aayog’s Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital project.