Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s school system has largely solved the problems that defined it for fifty years — enrolment, teachers, toilets, drinking water. The one gap left standing is the newest, and it decides whether the next decade of education reform reaches a classroom at all.
The UDISE+ 2025-26 report, released by the Ministry of Education, counts 24.72 crore students and 1.03 crore teachers across roughly 14.67 lakh schools. The pupil-teacher ratio is 24:1, well inside the NEP 2020 benchmark of 30:1. Electricity reaches 95 per cent of schools, safe drinking water 99.5 per cent, girls’ toilets 98.5 per cent and boys’ toilets 97.2 per cent. Dropout has fallen to 1.8 per cent at the preparatory stage and 7.0 per cent at the secondary stage, lower at all three stages than in 2022-23. Gross enrolment at the middle stage is 89.6 per cent, at the secondary stage 71.7 per cent. Internet reaches 67.4 per cent of schools.
The system at scale: 24.72 crore students and 1.03 crore teachers. On the infrastructure India spent forty years building — water, power, toilets — the job is close to finished. On connectivity it is two-thirds done.
32.6 per cent of 14.67 lakh schools is about 4.78 lakh schools with no internet connection. Every digital reform of the next decade has to reach them last, or it does not reach them.
At a Glance
• Students: 24.72 crore · Teachers: 1.03 crore · Schools: about 14.67 lakh
• Pupil-teacher ratio: 24:1 against an NEP 2020 benchmark of 30:1
• Internet: 67.4 per cent of schools — roughly 4.78 lakh without
• Electricity: 95% · Drinking water: 99.5% · Girls’ toilets: 98.5%
• Dropout: 1.8% preparatory, 7.0% secondary — lower at all stages than 2022-23
• GER: 89.6% middle stage, 71.7% secondary stage
• Women teachers: 54.9 per cent of the workforce
Set the connectivity figure beside the secondary enrolment figure and the structural problem comes into focus. Middle-stage enrolment is 89.6 per cent; secondary-stage enrolment is 71.7 per cent. Roughly eighteen percentage points of children are present in class eight and absent by class ten. That is where India’s human-capital arithmetic is decided, because secondary completion is the threshold at which formal-sector employability, vocational certification and higher education all become possible. And secondary is precisely the stage at which teaching depends most on things a connection carries — a laboratory simulation, a subject specialist teaching remotely to a school that has no physics graduate, a board-exam question bank, a scholarship application that exists only online. A school without internet in 2026 is not merely less modern. It is structurally cut off from the cheapest available remedy for its own teacher shortage.
The constructive reading is that this is the easiest of the remaining problems, and India has done the harder version of it twice already. Electricity in schools went from a chronic gap to 95 per cent; drinking water to 99.5 per cent. Neither happened through exhortation; both happened because a target was set, funded and counted school by school in this same dataset. Connectivity is more tractable than either, since it needs no trench and no tank — it needs bandwidth, a device, a power backup and someone in the school who is responsible for it. The sequencing that would matter most is to take the secondary and higher-secondary schools first, in the districts where the middle-to-secondary drop is widest, rather than spreading a thin national average. The UDISE+ system already knows exactly which schools those are. That is the quiet strength of collecting this data every year: the country does not have to guess where to start.
