Since a Niti Aayog report surfaced in June 2026, a familiar refrain has returned to public debate: nearly a lakh government schools have shut down over the past decade—proof, say critics, of the government abandoning public education and of the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) working against the poor. The number is real. We have 94,000 fewer schools now than just over 1.1 million in 2014. The conclusion being drawn from it is not.

I say this having spent years observing the public education system and working with colleagues in these schools every day. The Azim Premji Foundation has close to 2,500 team members working directly with government schools across 63 districts in six states. They visit and work in nearly a lakh schools every quarter.

In these districts, we have seen about 1,000 instances of what gets counted statistically as a school closure. In none of these cases has a child lost access to school, nor has it become significantly more difficult, while the quality of schooling has improved.

This is worth dwelling on because the attack seems so logical and its emotional appeal is so obvious (it suggests abandoned children) that we must resist emotive over-simplifications.

Almost all the closures we have observed on the ground fall into one of two categories and both are being read in the same needlessly alarmist way.

The first is straightforward and common: two small government schools are within walking distance of each other, in the same habitation or adjoining ones, each too small to be run optimally. When one is closed, its children and usually its teachers move to the other, which also continues to serve the same children as before.

Nothing changes for any child except that she now attends a school with more classmates and teachers and often a head-teacher who was earlier stretched thin across two campuses. Access for students does not get any more difficult as their school remains at walking distance after the merger.

The second is a more technical version of the same thing: two nearby schools are formally merged under a single management unit; this shows up as a ‘closure’ in the count, even though nothing on the ground actually shut down.

The NEP is explicit that such rationalization must not compromise access, and in the cases we have observed, it has not. A spreadsheet cannot tell the difference between a school that vanished from a community and one consolidated with its neighbour, and much of the public conversation is being conducted at the level of the spreadsheet, not the lived reality.

Niti Aayog’s own report can explain why states did this. India runs roughly five times as many schools as China for comparable enrolment; over 36% of our schools have fewer than 50 students.

A small school cannot have subject-wise teachers even for subjects like language, math, science and social science, leave alone having teachers for art and physical education. Its physical resources are also limited.

Teachers in such schools have to work in isolation and students do not get an important learning experience: of working with a number of peers. Consolidation is not neglect of the public system. It is an improvement.

The change makes teachers more effective, a part of the argument that critics rarely engage with. Consider a teacher who earlier ran a small school alone: 25 children spread across five grades and three subjects, teaching everything to everyone, all day, with no one to share the load.

After consolidation, that teacher may be one of two or three in a school of 50 students across the same five grades—more children learning within their peer group, and with work divided sensibly: one teacher takes languages across grades, another mathematics and science, a third the youngest grades.

This is precisely what the NEP’s emphasis on subject teaching and reducing the multi-grade burden is meant to produce. Three teachers each handling one subject well beats one teacher doing three subjects badly.

Not every closure everywhere in India has been handled well, admittedly. Nor does it mean oversight is unnecessary. Poor implementation is always possible and it must be watched for, especially in remote and difficult terrain.

But the case being made by closure-data alarmists is not that specific implementation has faltered in specific places, it is a sweeping claim that school closures in themselves amount to an assault on public education and on the poor. That claim does not survive contact with the reality of classrooms and habitations.

What is happening, in the overwhelming majority of instances we have seen, is a slow and overdue correction: fewer, better-staffed, better-resourced schools replacing many small, thinly resourced, single-teacher ones. That this is being read instead as evidence of government apathy says more about the preconceptions people have than about what is happening in education.

The test of any such school system reform is simple: can every child still get to a functional school without difficulty and is the learning obtained better than before? On both counts, the evidence from the ground is reassuring. That evidence deserves at least as much attention as the number ‘94,000’ being bandied about by critics.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.

Since a Niti Aayog report surfaced in June 2026, a familiar refrain has returned to public debate: nearly a lakh government schools have shut down over the past decade—proof, say critics, of the government abandoning public education and of the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) working against the poor. The number is real. We have 94,000 fewer schools now than just over 1.1 million in 2014. The conclusion being drawn from it is not.

I say this having spent years observing the public education system and working with colleagues in these schools every day. The Azim Premji Foundation has close to 2,500 team members working directly with government schools across 63 districts in six states. They visit and work in nearly a lakh schools every quarter.

In these districts, we have seen about 1,000 instances of what gets counted statistically as a school closure. In none of these cases has a child lost access to school, nor has it become significantly more difficult, while the quality of schooling has improved.

This is worth dwelling on because the attack seems so logical and its emotional appeal is so obvious (it suggests abandoned children) that we must resist emotive over-simplifications.

Almost all the closures we have observed on the ground fall into one of two categories and both are being read in the same needlessly alarmist way.

The first is straightforward and common: two small government schools are within walking distance of each other, in the same habitation or adjoining ones, each too small to be run optimally. When one is closed, its children and usually its teachers move to the other, which also continues to serve the same children as before.

Nothing changes for any child except that she now attends a school with more classmates and teachers and often a head-teacher who was earlier stretched thin across two campuses. Access for students does not get any more difficult as their school remains at walking distance after the merger.

The second is a more technical version of the same thing: two nearby schools are formally merged under a single management unit; this shows up as a ‘closure’ in the count, even though nothing on the ground actually shut down.

The NEP is explicit that such rationalization must not compromise access, and in the cases we have observed, it has not. A spreadsheet cannot tell the difference between a school that vanished from a community and one consolidated with its neighbour, and much of the public conversation is being conducted at the level of the spreadsheet, not the lived reality.

Niti Aayog’s own report can explain why states did this. India runs roughly five times as many schools as China for comparable enrolment; over 36% of our schools have fewer than 50 students.

A small school cannot have subject-wise teachers even for subjects like language, math, science and social science, leave alone having teachers for art and physical education. Its physical resources are also limited.

Teachers in such schools have to work in isolation and students do not get an important learning experience: of working with a number of peers. Consolidation is not neglect of the public system. It is an improvement.

The change makes teachers more effective, a part of the argument that critics rarely engage with. Consider a teacher who earlier ran a small school alone: 25 children spread across five grades and three subjects, teaching everything to everyone, all day, with no one to share the load.

After consolidation, that teacher may be one of two or three in a school of 50 students across the same five grades—more children learning within their peer group, and with work divided sensibly: one teacher takes languages across grades, another mathematics and science, a third the youngest grades.

This is precisely what the NEP’s emphasis on subject teaching and reducing the multi-grade burden is meant to produce. Three teachers each handling one subject well beats one teacher doing three subjects badly.

Not every closure everywhere in India has been handled well, admittedly. Nor does it mean oversight is unnecessary. Poor implementation is always possible and it must be watched for, especially in remote and difficult terrain.

But the case being made by closure-data alarmists is not that specific implementation has faltered in specific places, it is a sweeping claim that school closures in themselves amount to an assault on public education and on the poor. That claim does not survive contact with the reality of classrooms and habitations.

What is happening, in the overwhelming majority of instances we have seen, is a slow and overdue correction: fewer, better-staffed, better-resourced schools replacing many small, thinly resourced, single-teacher ones. That this is being read instead as evidence of government apathy says more about the preconceptions people have than about what is happening in education.

The test of any such school system reform is simple: can every child still get to a functional school without difficulty and is the learning obtained better than before? On both counts, the evidence from the ground is reassuring. That evidence deserves at least as much attention as the number ‘94,000’ being bandied about by critics.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.