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On August 15, 2026, activist Abhijeet Dipke started the ‘School Theek Karo Abhiyaan’ (Fix The Schools Movement) from his ancestral taluka in Hingoli district, Maharashtra. Among the first schools he visited was a government primary school in Limbala village.

On his Instagram account, he posted a video of talking to a senior official over the phone about the despicable state of the school. Another post on Dipke’s X account said, “Remove alcoholic principal! Villagers have repeatedly complained about the school principal’s alcoholism, but senior authorities have taken no action. If the principal is not removed by Tuesday, I will join the villagers in protest. The school also has just two teachers for five classrooms. These issues cannot be ignored. Limbala village, Hingoli district (15/08/2026).”

In the video, he can be heard complaining that there are just two teachers for five classrooms. He finds this shocking, but it is better than the median government primary school in India, which have two teachers and three classrooms for five grades – the Right to Education (RTE) norms deem this sufficient for a school of forty students. By these norms, the school in Limbala exceeds expectations.

Government schools are everywhere

India has the largest school education system in the world, with 14.66 lakh schools, of which 10.85 lakh are government schools. It also has the world’s largest school-going population, with 23.2 crore children attending school in 2025-26.

Of these students, roughly half – around 11.53 crore – attend government schools. This is the vulnerable half facing generational poverty, lacking social and cultural capital, disproportionately bearing the weight of parochialism. Many are first-generation learners. Many have suffered irreparable deprivations in childhood from malnutrition and other poverty-induced stress factors.

Not to worry – Article 21A of the constitution provides free and compulsory education to all children (between the ages of six and fourteen) as a legally enforceable fundamental right. The Right to Education Act, 2010, lays out a basic but elaborate framework of norms, rules and regulations for ‘elementary education’ (classes 1 to 8) across India.

These include provisions to establish neighbourhood schools, such that every village has at least one school. Pupil-teacher ratios are specified progressively. Procedures are laid out for the development of annual School Development Plans.

With such an elaborate framework, government schools can be found in terrain as difficult as the shifting sandbars of Assam, the cold deserts of Ladakh or the heavily forested hilltops of Odisha. A primary school can be found even where post offices and police outposts are absent.

So why aren’t children learning?

Indian government schools are in shambles. Little to no learning takes place in them. Going by Annual Status of Education  Report (ASER) 2024, less than half of Grade 5 children in rural government schools could read a Grade 2 text. In Grade 8, one-third of rural government schoolchildren could only read a Grade 2 text. Less than a third of Grade 5 children in rural areas could do basic division.

Unsurprisingly, by the government’s own statistics on school retention in 2024-25 (U-DISE ), out of every 100 children who entered class 1 ten years ago, only 63 children made it to class 10.

Also read: Education Has Not Failed Indian Children Everywhere – Why?

Some locate the problem in the lack of “critical thinking pedagogy” in schools and an excessive emphasis on rote learning. Some suggest teacher apathy, while the cynical blame parental neglect and “bad domestic environment”. The state (annoyingly, even academics) sometimes mystify the persistence of mediocrity in government schooling – “We are doing everything right, by the book, so why isn’t it working,” they ask.

The assumption is that the obvious answers to what ails Indian government schools’ have been examined and found unsatisfactory.

That may not be true. Government schooling in India fails because the RTE framework is set up to fail. The norms set by the Right to Education Act are to blame.

The history of schooling in independent India

Despite socialist leanings, the Indian government did not prioritise mass education in the early years of independence. This was partly because education was a State Subject until 1976 when it was pushed into the Concurrent List by the 42nd amendment. Prior to that, only states had the power to legislate regarding compulsory education.

The states did not do this with a sense of urgency, as the vision for India’s welfare state was centrally devised by Planning Commission pundits. The high-modernist avatar of socialism adopted by the commission prioritised spending the education budget to create a technocratic elite instead of a literate electorate.

India had little of the revolutionary energy or missionary zeal that led to mass literacy drives in communist regimes or western Christian societies (except for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where communist sympathies and missionary schools played an outsize role in the early spread of education).

The constitution mentioned the right to free and compulsory education for children up to the age of fourteen, but only as a non-justiciable directive principle of state policy.

The ball started rolling in 1986, when the National Policy on Education took cognisance of most Indian schools lacking bare necessities – even blackboards – to teach. Operation Blackboard was launched in 1987, the first attempt by the Union government to impose universal minimum standards for schools across India. It was made possible by the 42nd amendment.

The standards imposed by Operation Blackboard were modest – two teachers and two classrooms per primary school. A 1992 revision expanded the norm to thee classrooms and as many teachers. Only in 2002 – 55 years since independence and 26 years since........

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