On August 15, 2026, activist Abhijeet Dipke started the ‘School Theek Karo Abhiyaan’ (Fix The Schools Movement) from his ancestral taluka in Hingoli district, Maharashtra. Among the first schools he visited was a government primary school in Limbala village.On his Instagram account, he posted a video of talking to a senior official over the phone about the despicable state of the school. Another post on Dipke’s X account said, “Remove alcoholic principal! Villagers have repeatedly complained about the school principal’s alcoholism, but senior authorities have taken no action. If the principal is not removed by Tuesday, I will join the villagers in protest. The school also has just two teachers for five classrooms. These issues cannot be ignored. Limbala village, Hingoli district (15/08/2026).”In the video, he can be heard complaining that there are just two teachers for five classrooms. He finds this shocking, but it is better than the median government primary school in India, which have two teachers and three classrooms for five grades – the Right to Education (RTE) norms deem this sufficient for a school of forty students. By these norms, the school in Limbala exceeds expectations.Government schools are everywhereIndia has the largest school education system in the world, with 14.66 lakh schools, of which 10.85 lakh are government schools. It also has the world’s largest school-going population, with 23.2 crore children attending school in 2025-26.Of these students, roughly half – around 11.53 crore – attend government schools. This is the vulnerable half facing generational poverty, lacking social and cultural capital, disproportionately bearing the weight of parochialism. Many are first-generation learners. Many have suffered irreparable deprivations in childhood from malnutrition and other poverty-induced stress factors.Not to worry – Article 21A of the constitution provides free and compulsory education to all children (between the ages of six and fourteen) as a legally enforceable fundamental right. The Right to Education Act, 2010, lays out a basic but elaborate framework of norms, rules and regulations for ‘elementary education’ (classes 1 to 8) across India.These include provisions to establish neighbourhood schools, such that every village has at least one school. Pupil-teacher ratios are specified progressively. Procedures are laid out for the development of annual School Development Plans.With such an elaborate framework, government schools can be found in terrain as difficult as the shifting sandbars of Assam, the cold deserts of Ladakh or the heavily forested hilltops of Odisha. A primary school can be found even where post offices and police outposts are absent.So why aren’t children learning?Indian government schools are in shambles. Little to no learning takes place in them. Going by Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, less than half of Grade 5 children in rural government schools could read a Grade 2 text. In Grade 8, one-third of rural government schoolchildren could only read a Grade 2 text. Less than a third of Grade 5 children in rural areas could do basic division.Unsurprisingly, by the government’s own statistics on school retention in 2024-25 (U-DISE+), out of every 100 children who entered class 1 ten years ago, only 63 children made it to class 10.Also read: Education Has Not Failed Indian Children Everywhere – Why?Some locate the problem in the lack of “critical thinking pedagogy” in schools and an excessive emphasis on rote learning. Some suggest teacher apathy, while the cynical blame parental neglect and “bad domestic environment”. The state (annoyingly, even academics) sometimes mystify the persistence of mediocrity in government schooling – “We are doing everything right, by the book, so why isn’t it working,” they ask.The assumption is that the obvious answers to what ails Indian government schools’ have been examined and found unsatisfactory.That may not be true. Government schooling in India fails because the RTE framework is set up to fail. The norms set by the Right to Education Act are to blame.The history of schooling in independent IndiaDespite socialist leanings, the Indian government did not prioritise mass education in the early years of independence. This was partly because education was a State Subject until 1976 when it was pushed into the Concurrent List by the 42nd amendment. Prior to that, only states had the power to legislate regarding compulsory education.The states did not do this with a sense of urgency, as the vision for India’s welfare state was centrally devised by Planning Commission pundits. The high-modernist avatar of socialism adopted by the commission prioritised spending the education budget to create a technocratic elite instead of a literate electorate.India had little of the revolutionary energy or missionary zeal that led to mass literacy drives in communist regimes or western Christian societies (except for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where communist sympathies and missionary schools played an outsize role in the early spread of education).The constitution mentioned the right to free and compulsory education for children up to the age of fourteen, but only as a non-justiciable directive principle of state policy.The ball started rolling in 1986, when the National Policy on Education took cognisance of most Indian schools lacking bare necessities – even blackboards – to teach. Operation Blackboard was launched in 1987, the first attempt by the Union government to impose universal minimum standards for schools across India. It was made possible by the 42nd amendment.The standards imposed by Operation Blackboard were modest – two teachers and two classrooms per primary school. A 1992 revision expanded the norm to thee classrooms and as many teachers. Only in 2002 – 55 years since independence and 26 years since the 42nd amendment – did Parliament pass the 86th Constitutional Amendment, inserting Article 21A which guaranteed free and compulsory education between the ages of 6 and 14.In 2001, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) was launched as the primary vehicle for providing school education under a uniform set of rules, standards and guidelines to every village.Schools began to reach hitherto untouched habitations. India went from having 9.71 lakh schools in 1990-91 to 15.09 lakh schools in 2020-21 – a 50% increase. Between 1990 and 2010, about 6.07 lakh schools were added, more than all the schools in independent India until 1990.In 2009, sixty-two years after independence, India gave itself the Right to Education Act, mandating free and compulsory education between the ages of six and fourteen, laying out strict norms for minimum physical infrastructure and pupil-teacher ratios. The right to education was finally justiciable and universal.Where are we now?India has 14.66 lakh schools today, of which 7.69 lakh are run by the departments of education in different states. About 3.16 lakh schools are run by other state or central government bodies or government-aided bodies such as panchayats or municipalities, tribal welfare departments, social welfare departments, ministries like defence and railways and madrasas. There are 3.59 lakh private schools.Of the 14.66 lakh schools and 23.23 crore schoolchildren in India, our analysis is confined to the 7.69 lakh state-education-department-run schools and their 9.4 crore children, who are at the mercy of the minimalist SSA-RTE architecture.The 4.59 lakh schools (serving 1.68 crore schoolchildren) run by local bodies and other central government ministries often have better standards and are tremendously diverse across different management bodies and regions.Schools also vary by the number of grades they serve. Some schools, like the one in Limbala Dipke began his movement from, have classes 1 to 5. Other schools have classes 1 to 8, yet others can have classes 6 to 10, 1 to 12, 6 to 8 etc. These distinctions are critical as the right to education norms differ for different grade groups.Table 2 shows something interesting – the typical government school has just classes 1 to 5, and nearly half of government schoolchildren study in schools with just 8 grades or fewer. In contrast, private schools are more likely to have more than 5 grades, and the typical private schoolchild is likely to study in a school with at least classes 1 to 10.Thus the government schooling system is largely characterised by tiny primary schools dispersed throughout hamlets and villages, while the private schooling system is vertically integrated and geographically convergent.There is a government primary school every kilometre – naturally, each school only has around 30 to 50 students. Could this explain the divergence in quality between government and private schools? The devil lies in the details – specifically, the RTE norms on teachers and classrooms.All hail the pupil-teacher ratio!Policy planners who pushed for universalisation of elementary schooling were aware of the social hurdles to attaining it – social prejudices against disadvantaged castes, genders and classes threatened local elite capture of government schools, if schools were not made available in plenty.Often the hurdle would be physical – many villages had no metaled roads, and travelling even moderate distances could be hazardous for children. To make schools physically accessible for the most disadvantaged social groups in the most backward habitations, the operational norms for RTE prioritised minimising distance and establishing “neighbourhood schools” within walking distance of any home.Under the Central Right to Education Rules, 2010, the maximum walking distance to a primary school was kept at 1 km, while for upper primary, it was kept at 3 km.Also read: Realising a Child’s Right to Education: Going Beyond the Brick and MortarBut maximal penetration of the hinterland imposed another cost – as there were simply “too many” schools, each could only be minimally provisioned, especially considering how each school was expected to have very few students – typically one hundred or fewer. Fiscal constraints and the fear of yielding too much bargaining power to a burgeoning class of teachers forced the state to limit the number of teachers per school by focusing only on the pupil-teacher ratio.This was a neat sleight-of-hand. The RTE Act contains a Schedule that lists all the norms for different schools and grade-classes in seven broad categories. For teachers, the Schedule rules that the number of teachers appointed to a school will be dependent on the number of students.For up to 60 students, two teachers will be appointed. For 61-90, three teachers – then four teachers up to 120, five up to 150 and so on. The pupil-teacher ratio must never exceed 40:1.Under this arrangement, the pupil-teacher ratio would hover below 30:1. Indeed, today the median pupil-teacher ratio for government primary schools is 16:1. This sounds ideal, until one considers that even in a school of 50 students, there are 5 grades.An ideal pupil-teacher ratio is only adequate when there are enough children and enough teachers to serve all grades individually – such as when there are 150 primary grade students and five teachers. For schools with fewer children, and thus a lower minimal number of teachers, maintaining a pupil-teacher ratio of 30:1 does not guarantee that every grade will have one teacher.This is not the case for upper primary sections (classes 6 to 8), for whom there must be at least one teacher pre grade, as per RTE norms.The consequences of this disparity in teacher staffing norms in government schools for primary and upper-primary grades becomes clear from the data. In 2025-26, the median enrolment for a government primary school (run by the departments of education in different states) was 41. The median number of teachers was just two.The median pupil-teacher ratio was 16:1, which sounds excellent. But the teacher-grade ratio for government primary schools is just 0.4 – which means that in a typical government primary-only school, which account for more than half of all government schools, there are just two teachers!However, in government schools that have grades 1 through 8, we see that the median teacher-grade ratio for primary school children increases to 0.8 – there are now four teachers for the five primary grades. This, while inadequate, is twice the figure for primary-only schools.This happens because RTE mandates a teacher-grade ratio of 1:1 for upper primary sections and schools with grades 1 through 8 usually have more children – this increases the median number of teachers in such a school to six.Also read: 73% of Students Drop Out Before Completing Higher Secondary, Parliamentary Panel FindsWhile the stricter norm is for teachers of upper primary classes only, many of these upper primary teachers also end up teaching some primary grades, leading to a doubling of available primary grade teachers.Additionally, the number of classrooms is tied to the number of teachers for primary sections. For every teacher in primary grades, there needs only be one classroom. Thus, for a school with 50 students and two teachers, only two classrooms are needed to make the school RTE compliant – even if five grades are to be taught.Unsurprisingly, for government primary-only schools, while the median classroom-teacher ratio is 1:1, implying one classroom per teacher, the median classroom-grade ratio is 0.6, implying only three classrooms for grades 1 through 5.Clearly, the difference in quality between government primary-only schools and government upper primary schools is largely explained by the difference in norms.Pedagogical adequacy versus perverse complianceOf India’s 4.5 lakh government primary-only schools, 2.9 lakh schools have neither one teacher per grade nor one classroom per grade. These 2.9 lakh schools serve 1.1 crore children. Of these schools, 79,639 have one classroom for every grade, but not one teacher for every grade and they serve 51 lakh children.A small share of 27,730 schools has one teacher per grade but not one classroom per grade.Only 49,049 government primary-only schools – out of 4.5 lakh – have both one teacher and one classroom per grade. These schools serve 70 lakh primary school children – out of the 2.6 crore students.Interestingly, when broken down by whether the schools are RTE-compliant based on their number of teachers and classrooms, we find that a school with less than one teacher and one classroom per grade is 68% likely to be RTE compliant. On the other hand, a school with adequate number of teachers and classrooms (one per grade for both) is only 54.6% likely to be RTE compliant.How does one explain this? Is RTE compliance not supposed to signal adequate resource provisioning? A closer look at its norms reveals that it is not always the case. This is because the number of classrooms is not tied to the number of grades, nor even the number of children, but the number of teachers. A school can only be RTE compliant if it has classrooms equal to the number of teachers.Hence a school with 100 students, five teachers and four classrooms is not RTE compliant, but it can become RTE compliant by reducing the number of teachers to four instead of increasing the number of classrooms to five to serve all grades.Naturally, none of the schools with five teachers but fewer than five classrooms are RTE compliant. A “rationalisation” exercise to increase RTE compliance might even lead to the transfer of the teacher from one of these non-compliant primary schools to a primary school with five classrooms and six teachers. Very little is gained, if anything, by such rationalisation.At the same time, a teacher is rarely transferred to a school with three classrooms and three teachers, as having an extra teacher would make the school non-compliant. The RTE norms thus actively discourage the appointment and transfer of teachers to schools that need them the most.The ‘multi-grade classrooms’ rule and other problemsNowhere in the RTE Act, its rules or guidelines is the appointment of administrative and auxiliary staff mentioned. This omission dooms government schoolteachers to sacrificing instruction time for daily official firefighting. This includes everything from printing question papers and forms, responding to arbitrary requests for data (on WhatsApp), organising more than a dozen events throughout the year like Har Ghar Tiranga and International Yoga Day.She also overlooks repairs, oversees construction of water-harvesting tanks, tends to nutri-gardens, assists block officials in village surveys and worries about why the lady who cleans the school toilets (paid out of the head teacher’s own pocket) has not shown up in two months.Teachers organise and serve mid-day meals, which would have been all right if it did not impose on their primary duty – to teach. It is an achievement to squeeze in just three hours of instruction in a six-hour school-day in these circumstances. Never mind that those three hours would be divided between the two grades sitting in the same classroom, being taught by the same teacher in 30-minute intervals.Technocrats expect schools to run well because the pupil-teacher ratio is 16:1 for a typical school, as national dashboards proudly declare. The rather naïve mistake is to imagine a classroom as having just 16 students and one teacher because this ratio is 16:1. As there are typically only two or three classrooms in a government primary school, teachers combine classes across grades.So what may look like one day of instruction for students in a very favourable pupil-teacher ratio is actually half a day of instruction for a student as the teacher juggles two grades at the same time in one classroom.Unsurprisingly, most schools do not have anything resembling a regular daily routine or ‘periods’ – teachers move from one subject to another and attend to one grade after another as they can best adjust. Children enter through the school gates and exit through it just like in any school, but nothing meaningful happens while they are inside. Children are being schooled, but as development scholar Lant Pritchett put it “schooling ain’t learning”.Some Indian scholars talk about the benefits of multi-grade teaching. Research shows that it can be pedagogically fruitful. But such research is typically conducted in Western societies where the teachers are better trained and professionally accountable, where children do not suffer from severe deprivations during childhood and schools are not under-resourced.Comparing deprivation-induced multi-grade teaching to the pedagogically beneficial species of multigrade teaching in the West is akin to comparing an unhygienic at-home delivery of a child in a remote Indian village to a water-birth carried out in a suburb of San Francisco.What is to be done?What are the options? Should RTE norms be revamped to ensure one teacher and classroom for every grade, along with administrative and support staff – no matter the number of students in a school? It is not as easy to make a case for it without considering the risks of fiscal and political entrenchment that it may come with. Should the state employ five full-time teachers for every 40 students?Another option is “school consolidation” – where two or more schools are “merged” into one so that, as the official reasoning goes, teachers can share resources and infrastructure can be built more economically. But will that not compromise on physical access to schools? Does that not risk realizing the fear of local elite capture and social exclusion that inspired this over-extended network of neighbourhood schools to begin with?There are a few “last options”, which may work best, especially if they are applied together. To begin with, the number of classrooms in schools must increase, for which the best bet is to change the RTE norms. The number of classrooms should be three at least, along with an extra room staffroom (which may be an extra classroom, if they so wish).Also read: In Charts: Making Sense of Poor Learning Outcomes of Primary School Children in Tribal DistrictsSmall government primary-only schools may be allowed to hire an extra apprentice-teacher of their choice from their own village, to be paid out of untied SMC or panchayat grants. The apprenticeship must end after a specific period and should have early age limits to service. This would ensure that the state does not create a permanent liability.Additionally, it provides a more direct route to accountability for teachers within the village and encourages community ownership of schools – something that is impossible with teachers from outside the local community or village they serve, who withdraw to the closest urban center as soon as they can afford to.A promising idea is that of model cluster schools. In the Indian government schooling hierarchy, schools are organised geographically into local clusters, which make up a block, which in turn make up a district. One school in every cluster could be specified as a Cluster School and expanded to serve several hundred children of classes 1 through 12 from all over the cluster.Samagra Shiksha may notify higher standards and norms for cluster schools, with greater provisioning of non-teaching staff, better infrastructure and special positions for the career progression of the best teachers in the cluster. The teacher may be insulated from official work by appointing special staff. To absorb a large number of students, cluster schools may deploy school vans that can ride on rough terrain and navigate narrow lanes.This is different from “school consolidation” or “merger”, which effectively means the closure of physical school at one location. Consolidated schools do not have separate standards, and once teachers in merged schools retire, new teachers are often not hired to take their place.A combination of expanded neighbourhood schools and model cluster schools works best because it takes care of both access and quality – neither efficiency nor equity is sacrificed. As incomes rise, transportation improves and parents become more willing and capable of send their children farther away from home to study, cluster schools may expand to absorb all the children of the cluster, reducing the burden on neighbourhood schools.These may then be converted into Anganwadi centres or foundational-stage schools serving only children aged three to eight, or pre-school to class 3, as defined by the National Education Policy.The Right To Education Act must be amendedExcept a precious few, Indian states have historically abdicated their responsibility to provide social goods, be it health, education or law and order. The distal causes of this dereliction have been debated ad nauseum.What is clear is that the state does very little unless formally challenged. With the onset of dashboard governance, where the state must blast optics of efficiency and target fulfilment into the eyes of domestic and international observers, it is even more important to optimise the formal targets and norms, lest such a chase become counter-productive.At the very least, RTE norms must be amended so that compliance does not involve firing a teacher or tapering enrolment to superficially increase pupil-teacher ratios. They must be revamped such that a school with three teachers and three classrooms may not be considered ‘compliant’.RTE compliance needs to stop acting as a smokescreen for mediocrity.Ronit Hazarika is a PhD scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. His work concerns early childhood education, primary education, public policy and state capacity.