This is the first article in a two-part series on how the government school system has been hollowed out in the Modi years.New Delhi: Earlier this year, Member of Parliament John Brittas posted on X: “Govt admits in Rajya Sabha: India lost 18,727 government schools in 5 years, while private unaided schools rose by 8,475 in just one year. Public education is shrinking. Private schooling is expanding.”School closure, alarming in itself, gets doubly so when combined with another set of numbers, contained in the Economic Survey, 2025-26, tabled in Parliament three months ago: Most out-of-school children in India are between 14 to 18 in age. India has 20 million children who do not go to school in the 14-18 age group, described as secondary school age group by the survey. Of these, less than 1% have any formal skills training, the survey added.The Economic Survey did not stop there. It says not only are children not enrolled in school, the ones who are, don’t want to attend.It described as “concerning” the findings of the Government of India’s Parakh survey of 2024: only 55% students feel motivated to attend school, and less than half feel safe there.Governments, Union or state ones, are not responding to pressure from any quarter – legislature or judiciary – says lawyer Ashok Agarwal, who has fought and won several cases on the matter. Orders for school repair are essential, he argues – a dilapidated school is dangerous and one step away from closure.Agarwal says he has toured the country and fought against the sorry state of government schools, tutoring parents and students to demand more, and calling upon the local panchayat to get vocal. But it is a lost battle.“After I leave, they stop protesting. They are easily scared by the local politician or system,” he says.Here is what happened in Rajasthan, where seven young lives lost to a school building collapse resulted in court ire, but failed to yield reform.Deaths, court orders, but no actionSeven children died last year in July in Piplod village of Jhalawar district when the roof and wall of their classroom collapsed on them.The tragedy drew wide condemnation. The Wire reported that warnings from villagers about the school building’s condition were ignored. Members of higher castes had enrolled their children in a nearby private school. The school whose roof fell had students from tribal and lower caste families.The Rajasthan High Court took suo moto action, even as the fallout, a survey by the state government, found 5,500 or around 9% of the total 63,000 schools in utter ruin. The survey was reported widely. So was the high court’s order barring entry of students in the 86,000 dilapidated classrooms found by the survey across schools.Lawyer Agarwal, who had a writ pending in the high court for three years on the status of all government schools in Rajasthan, was relieved that the state government had been forced to give an account. Soon, his writ and the suo moto action of the court were joined, and placed in front of a special bench formed to probe the state of schools.The court pressed the state government of Rajasthan for a complete blueprint of the repairs.Another mishapIn January this year, the amicus curiae informed the court of another mishap: that the roof of the Government Upper Primary School in Bhains Khera village, district Bundi, had fallen. Thirty students, fortunately, escaped, having moved out of the school minutes before – they were sitting in the open field within the school compound.The court moved from scolding to talking numbers and handwringing, as the Rajasthan government tarried. Through affidavits from various departments, it knew that Rs 20,000 crore was required for the construction and repair of the schools. Of this, only Rs 1,624 crore is sanctioned.It called the budget allocated for school repair for the current financial year, Rs 1,000 crore, a “drop in the ocean”.“How, with such a paltry and inadequate budget, the government will provide safe and secure infrastructure to school-going children,” asked the exasperated court last month. Aparna Kalra is a Delhi School of Economics alumnus whose forte is investigations, profiles and data journalism. She has reported for Reuters, Mint, and worked as a fact-checker on a Facebook project for AFP.