A recent official report reveals a startling reality within India’s education sector: nearly 8,000 schools nationwide recorded no student enrollments during the 2024-25 academic year. The highest concentration of these empty institutions, along with the teachers employed within them, was found in West Bengal, followed by Telangana.
Despite the absence of students, these 7,993 schools collectively employ a significant workforce of 20,817 teachers. A particularly striking statistic shows that West Bengal alone accounts for 17,965 of these teachers and 3,812 schools with zero students.
Encouragingly, this figure represents an improvement from the previous academic year (2023-24), when 12,954 schools had no enrollments, indicating a reduction of over 5,000 such institutions.
Several states, including Haryana, Maharashtra, Goa, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, reported no schools with zero enrollments. Similarly, all Union Territories, including Puducherry, Lakshadweep, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Daman and Diu, and Chandigarh, as well as Delhi, successfully avoided this issue.
A senior official from the Ministry of Education highlighted that education is primarily a state responsibility. States have been advised to tackle the challenge of zero-enrollment schools, with some already implementing strategies such as merging schools to optimize resource utilization, including infrastructure and teaching staff.
Beyond West Bengal, Telangana recorded the second-highest number of schools without students at 2,245, employing 1,016 teachers. Madhya Pradesh followed with 463 such schools and 223 teachers.
In Uttar Pradesh, 81 schools were found to have no students. The Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad (UP Board) has taken a proactive stance, announcing plans to revoke the recognition of affiliated schools that have failed to enroll students for three consecutive academic years.
The data also shed light on another aspect of India’s schooling system: over 3.3 million students are currently being taught in more than 100,000 single-teacher schools nationwide. Andhra Pradesh leads in the number of these schools, with Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Lakshadweep also having a notable presence.
When it comes to student population within these single-teacher schools, Uttar Pradesh registers the highest numbers, followed by Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh.
Fortunately, there has been a positive trend in this area too, with the number of single-teacher schools decreasing by approximately 6% from 118,190 in 2022-23 to 110,971 in 2023-24.