The latest UDISE+ series tabled in the Lok Sabha records a net fall of 18,727 government schools over five academic years — from 10,32,049 in 2020–21 to 10,13,322 in 2024–25. Taken at face value, this can be read as a simple contraction. It is not. The year-wise pattern is uneven and state-driven: The big shifts arrive as single-year corrections, followed by plateaus, and the weight of the decline sits in a handful of administrations rather than across the map. In policy terms, this pattern is significant. A linear national headline suggests demographics. A clustered, episodic series suggests decisions: Consolidation, mergers and administrative clean-up. Lok Sabha records suggest the fall is not spread evenly across India. It is heaviest in a small cluster of states and UTs, where the government school count drops the most over five years.

The arithmetic makes one thing clear: the Top 10 do not merely account for the decline — they outstrip it. Together, they record a fall of 19,747 schools, exceeding India’s net five-year decline of 18,727. The excess tells its own story. Beyond this group, several states have held steady or inched upward, partially offsetting the drop. What emerges at the national level is not a uniform contraction, but a set of concentrated state adjustments presented as an all-India total.

How the decline unfolds: Inside the five-year pattern

Read year by year, the decline does not move like a tide. It breaks. The most significant movement comes early in the five-year window, when the national government school count absorbs a sharp correction, before settling into smaller adjustments. A steady downward line would suggest demographic drift or long-term demand change. What the series shows instead is timing — decisions landing on the register in specific years.The clearest example is Madhya Pradesh, where almost the entire five-year decline is compressed into a single moment. Between 2020–21 and 2021–22, the state’s government school count falls by more than 6,400. After that, the numbers barely move. Jammu & Kashmir follows a similar arc, but one year later. Its figures hold steady until 2021–22, drop sharply in 2022–23, and then flatten again. In both cases, the data reads like an administrative reset — one decisive year, followed by consolidation.Other states tell a quieter story. Assam and Odisha show declines spread across multiple years, without a single dramatic break. Their numbers step down gradually, suggesting consolidation carried out in phases rather than all at once. West Bengal, Karnataka and Maharashtra show an even slower erosion. The small year-on-year reductions that accumulate over time, rarely large enough to stand out in any single year, but persistent enough to matter across five.At the margins, the timing shifts again. Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh see their sharper corrections towards the end of the period, between 2023–24 and 2024–25. In smaller systems, these late adjustments carry a different weight. A few hundred schools disappearing from the register in a hill or border state can redraw access far more abruptly than larger numbers in the plains.Seen this way, the five-year series doesn’t look like a uniform national contraction. It becomes a record of when states chose to act and how abruptly those choices were reflected in official counts. The decline, in short, arrives in pulses, shaped as much by timing as by geography.

What a falling school count means

A falling government school count does not necessarily mean classrooms suddenly disappeared. It often means the system was rearranged. The five-year pattern suggests three likely things happening in different places: some schools were merged under one administrative unit, some very small or empty schools were shut or de-notified, and in some years the database was simply updated to reflect decisions taken earlier. That is why the numbers drop sharply in certain years and then sit flat.However, what the numbers don’t capture is the everyday outcome. A merger can mean a new campus, new routines, new travel—or it can mean the same classrooms, just a different entry in the database. A closure can push students farther out, or it can consolidate them into a better-resourced school. This is why the dataset should be read as a locator, not a verdict: t only shows where the official map has been redrawn most sharply.Find the state-wise government school count from 2021–22 to 2024–25 here.