For four straight years, India’s school enrolment numbers told a bleak story. Year after year, fewer children were in classrooms, and the decline grew steeper with each new report.
The newly released UDISE+ 2025-26 report, published by the Ministry of Education in July, cautiously changes that narrative.
The headline numbers look genuinely better this time, but the question is whether that’s a real turning point or just one good year sitting inside a longer, harder trend.
Total enrolment from Pre-Primary to Higher Secondary edged up marginally, from 24.69 crore to 24.72 crore, the first increase in this particular metric since the decline began.
The narrower Classes 1-12 figure still fell by 5.83 lakh students, a sliver compared to the 20.8 lakh drop recorded the year before.
Prof. Arun C Mehta, the former NIEPA professor whose independent analysis has tracked UDISE+ data more closely than almost anyone outside government, called this a genuine deceleration in the decline, though he was careful not to call it a recovery.
“One year of data cannot confirm a turning point, but it breaks a four-year pattern of worsening annual declines,” Mehta wrote.
Dig into where that slowdown is actually happening, and the picture splits in two.
Secondary enrolment grew 2.9 per cent, and Higher Secondary enrolment grew 4.6 per cent, both for the first time in years.
Secondary GER jumped 2.8 percentage points to 81.5 per cent, the largest single-year gain Mehta’s analysis has recorded across five years of comparable data.
Dropout fell two points to 9.5 per cent, fewer than one in ten secondary students out annually.
Secondary-level retention, the one indicator that had actually gotten worse the previous year, jumped nearly seven points, from 62.9 per cent to 69.8 per cent.
For the first time in the period Mehta’s data has tracked, more than half of all Class 1 entrants now finish Class 12.
The enrolment at primary level has decreased to 24.6 lakh students this year, from 34.6 lakh students last year, which continues to be the largest cause of the remaining decrease.
The reason cited by Mehta for this decrease is due to demographic factors and not because of any lack of access, considering the decreasing fertility rate in India.
The transition from government to private schooling, whereby private unaided schools gained 4.82 million pupils in the previous year, was sustained in 2025-26, but at a slower pace.
Government lost 8,077 schools while the number of private unaided schools increased by about 2,100. The fundamental trend has not changed; it is only losing steam.
According to the report, around three out of ten schools lack internet connectivity, a situation that remains skewed toward rural, tribal, and northeast states.
“UDISE+ 2025-26 does not yet prove the enrolment decline has bottomed out, that requires at least one more year of confirming data, said Mehta.
One encouraging year doesn’t erase four difficult ones. It just means next year’s numbers will matter more than most, he added.
Primary enrolment is still falling, the government-to-private shift hasn’t stopped, and the NEP’s 2030 target of universal enrolment remains, reports say.
