In recent years, India’s public education policy has pivoted toward a strategy of “school rationalisation” or consolidation. A comprehensive policy report released by NITI Aayog revealed that the number of government schools in India declined from 11.07 lakh to 10.13 lakh over a ten-year assessment period. This means that nearly 94,000 public schools have disappeared from the education landscape. As part of NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital in Education (SATH-E) project, this structural overhaul advocates for merging low-enrollment, sub-scale schools into larger “composite cluster schools”. While the administrative logic of resource optimisation is mathematically sound, the real-world execution of this policy presents a severe stress test for socio-economic equity, deeply impacting the country’s most vulnerable children.To evaluate the policy objectively, the crisis of school fragmentation must be acknowledged. Madhya Pradesh stands as the primary laboratory for this experiment. Under the SATH-E initiative, Madhya Pradesh led the nation by merging nearly 35,000 sub-scale schools into roughly 16,000 same-campus composite schools by integrating primary, middle, and high schools.From an administrative standpoint, the dividends were immediate and visible. NITI Aayog’s evaluation highlights that the availability of dedicated principals in these merged schools shot up to 55% from a meagre 20%. By pooling resources, the state successfully mitigated the chronic issue of single-teacher schools, deployed subject-specific educators more effectively, and provided infrastructure – such as smart classrooms and functional laboratories – that schools with fewer than 20 students could never afford.Where does the problem emerge?However, when this bureaucratic logic meets rural geography, significant friction emerges. While MP’s co-located mergers (schools inside the same campus) were seamless, the subsequent phases of merging distant schools created immediate barriers for the rural poor. In rural India, a neighbourhood school is a social anchor. When it closes, the physical distance to the nearest cluster hub increases.Without institutionalised, safe, and free public transit, the burden of commuting falls heavily on marginalised families. The most alarming fallout of this distance barrier is the risk of rising dropout rates, particularly among adolescent girls. Data shows that while India’s Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) is nearly universal at the primary stage (over 90%), it drops precipitously to 58.4% at the higher secondary stage. Safety concerns on lonely rural roads often force parents to withdraw daughters from education once the local school disappears, inadvertently reversing years of progress made under the Right to Education (RTE) Act.In many cases, since the promised transport subsidies or school vans do not reach the remote hamlets, the daily commute becomes an ordeal of physical exhaustion. Closing local schools directly worsens this secondary-stage dropout crisis, turning distance into a tool of exclusion.Logically, in urban areas, consolidation risks turning a crisis of distance into a crisis of density, potentially leading to overcrowded classrooms in designated cluster hubs. While these cluster schools possess better overall facilities, the sudden influx of students strains classroom capacities and dilutes individual teacher attention.Another parallel trend has emerged over the last decade: as the government school network shrank, public school enrolment fell by over 2 crore students, accompanied by an aggressive expansion of low-fee private schools. When a neighbourhood public school disappears, poor urban migrant families, pushed away by overcrowded cluster classrooms, are often forced to enrol their children in private institutions. This shifts a massive financial burden onto informal daily-wage earners, eating into their survival wages.Beyond institutional statistics, school consolidation deeply disrupts the socio-emotional learning environment of first-generation learners. A hyper-local village school acts as an extension of the community, offering a sense of cultural and psychological safety to children whose parents cannot read or write. Thrusting these children into unfamiliar, distant, and large cluster environments often induces alienation, directly affecting classroom retention. Furthermore, sub-scale schools served as critical delivery centres for India’s nutritional safety net through Mid-Day Meals. Long commutes on empty stomachs can directly jeopardise both nutritional metrics and classroom attentiveness.As India marches towards its development goals of Viksit Bharat @2047 vision, the roadmap must enhance both quality and equity. NITI Aayog emphasises that the roadmap must enhance both quality and equity. A purely economic view that treats public education through cost-benefit spreadsheets is inherently flawed. Madhya Pradesh’s model proves that consolidation fixes administrative supply-side issues, but the demand-side access requires strict safeguards. A balanced approach demands transitioning from a model of aggressive closure to a “Right-to-Access First” model. RTE-Compliant Mapping: School mergers should strictly not be permitted if the new cluster school violates the statutory distance rules laid out in the RTE Act (1 km for primary). Legally Guaranteed Transport: Mirroring MP’s experimental transport subsidy but expanding it, the state must legally and financially guarantee free, dedicated, and safe transport (buses or localized vans) for every single displaced student. Decentralised Veto Power: Top-down administrative mandates must be replaced by democratic consultation. Local Panchayats and School Management Committees (SMCs) should have a functional veto over whether their local school is consolidated.Ultimately, the metric of success for India’s educational policy should not be how many under-enrolled buildings were closed to balance a budget, but whether every single child retains their constitutional right to accessible, free, and quality education.Dr. Subhash Kumar is an Assistant Professor at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute Prayagraj.Anurag Pandey is a DPhil Research Scholar, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj.