A Sonam Wangchuk hunger strike over exam leaks has put education back in the headlines. The data underneath the headlines tells a more complicated story about India’s education system than any single protest can.

On a hot July afternoon at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, Sonam Wangchuk sat on an indefinite hunger strike for the third week running. The Ladakhi educationist, known for decades of quiet work on schooling in the trans-Himalayan region long before he became a familiar face on the evening news, was not protesting for Ladakh this time. He was protesting for something that touches every Indian household with a child preparing for a competitive exam: the integrity of the system that decides who gets to become a doctor, an engineer, or a civil servant.

His demand was blunt — the resignation of the Union Education Minister, over the repeated leaking of question papers, most recently NEET-UG. By mid-July, doctors at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital had moved him in for observation as his health declined. Whatever one makes of the politics around him, the strike forced a question into the open that has been sitting quietly under the surface for years: is something actually wrong with Indian education, or is this one more news cycle that will pass once the cameras move on?

The honest answer, once you sit with the numbers, is both. Some things are visibly getting better. Others have been broken for so long that the system now treats the brokenness as normal.

India’s Education System Is at a Crossroads

Start with the trigger for Wangchuk’s protest, because it is the most visible symptom. In May 2026, the National Testing Agency did something it had never done before — it cancelled NEET-UG itself, the exam held on 3 May, after a leak scandal, and handed the matter to the CBI. It was not the first time. NEET’s predecessor, AIPMT, was scrapped entirely in 2015 after the Supreme Court called it a national shame. NEET 2024 produced 67 students with a perfect score of 720 out of 720, an anomaly that triggered nationwide protests; the Supreme Court eventually let the exam stand but ordered a limited re-test for 1,563 candidates after acknowledging that at least 155 students had directly benefited from a leak in Bihar. Independent tallies of major recruitment and entrance exams — NEET, UGC-NET, state police and teacher-eligibility tests among them — count at least eight to a dozen serious leak episodes between 2024 and 2026 alone.

This is not a story about one exam or one government. It is a story about what happens when a country tries to sort tens of millions of young people through a small number of high-stakes gates, using an examination infrastructure that has not kept pace with the scale of demand it is asked to manage. Roughly 2.3 million candidates sit for NEET each year. When the gate itself cannot be trusted, the damage is not abstract — it lands on families who spent years and savings preparing a child for a fair shot.

The Money Question Nobody Quite Answers

Wangchuk’s protest is about exams, but the deeper argument about Indian education has always been about money — specifically, how much of it the state is willing to commit.

In 1966, the Kothari Commission recommended that India spend 6 percent of GDP on education. Sixty years on, the country has never got there. The Economic Survey’s own figures show total education spending — centre and states combined — sliding from 2.8 percent of GDP in 2017-19 to 2.7 percent in 2021-22, before edging back to around 2.9 percent more recently. The Union Budget for 2026-27 gave education its largest rupee allocation ever, ₹1,39,289 crore, split roughly ₹83,562 crore for schools and ₹55,727 crore for higher education. The headline sounds generous. But measured against a Union Budget that has itself grown to over ₹53 lakh crore, education’s share has actually shrunk — down to about 2.6 percent of the total outlay, compared with roughly 3 percent a few budgets ago. The rupee number grows every year; the priority, measured as a share of what the country spends on everything else, has been quietly declining.

Compare this with what other economies do. Developed nations typically spend upward of 10 percent of GDP on education when private and public spending are combined; India’s combined centre-state figure sits closer to 4-5 percent, and the Union government’s own direct spending is a much smaller sliver of that. This is the least politically charged number in the whole debate — it has stayed roughly the same distance from the 6 percent target under governments of every stripe. That consistency is itself a data point: underfunding education relative to ambition is not a partisan failure, it is a structural one.

Where the National Education Policy actually stands

Much of the reform activity in Indian education over the last five years has been an attempt to implement the National Education Policy of 2020, the third such policy since Independence and the first sweeping rewrite of school and higher education since 1986. It is worth pausing on where that project actually stands, because the honest picture is split down the middle: the school-level changes are running roughly on schedule, while the bigger institutional promises in higher education are not.

On the school side, the old 10+2 structure has been replaced by the 5+3+3+4 framework — foundational, preparatory, middle and secondary stages — and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education, which spells out what each stage is meant to teach, was notified in 2023. The push for mother-tongue or regional-language instruction up to Class 5 is underway, unevenly, across states. Crucially, the foundational literacy and numeracy campaign under NIPUN Bharat is the same effort ASER 2024 credited for the reading and arithmetic gains described later in this piece — which suggests that where NEP’s school-level reforms have actually reached classrooms, the data backs them up.

Higher education tells a different story. The Academic Bank of Credits, which lets students bank and transfer credits across institutions, is operational and covers more than 620 universities. The Common University Entrance Test is in its sixth year and now draws over 25 lakh applicants. The four-year undergraduate degree with multiple entry and exit points has been adopted by most central universities, though state universities have been slower, citing faculty shortages and infrastructure gaps. Three foreign university campuses are now running on Indian soil under the new rules.

But NEP’s central institutional promise — a single Higher Education Commission of India to replace the UGC, AICTE, NCTE and the tangle of professional councils that currently regulate different corners of higher education — has not materialised. A bill to create it was introduced in 2024 and lapsed without being passed. The UGC and AICTE continue to function exactly as they did before the policy was announced. And the policy’s own financial ask has not been met either: NEP 2020 revives the same 6 percent of GDP figure the Kothari Commission proposed in 1966, while actual spending sits closer to 2.9 to 3.2 percent — the policy, in other words, inherited the funding gap rather than closing it.

There is a federal dimension to this too, worth noting without taking a side in it. Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal have resisted the three-language formula and declined to sign the MoUs required for the PM-SHRI school scheme, arguing the conditions attached amount to a central mandate on a subject the Constitution places on the Concurrent List, shared between the Centre and the states. The Centre, in turn, withheld Samagra Shiksha funds from states that did not sign, a decision Tamil Nadu has contested in the Supreme Court. Whatever the merits on either side, it illustrates a structural reality that any national education reform in India has to work through: education is not one government’s to redesign alone, and disagreements over pace and design are, in some sense, built into the system rather than a sign that the system has failed.

What that money buys — or doesn’t

Numbers on spending, and on policy intent, only matter if they translate into what children in a classroom actually know. Here the picture, to its credit, is not uniformly grim.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, which surveys reading and arithmetic among roughly 6.5 lakh rural children, found the sharpest improvement in learning outcomes since 2022 — the biggest gains coming, notably, in government rather than private schools. The share of Class 3 government-school students able to read a Class 2-level text rose from 16.3 percent to 23.4 percent between 2022 and 2024, and those able to do subtraction jumped from about 20 percent to nearly 28 percent over the same period.

Read that again, though, and the improvement looks smaller against the baseline it started from. Even after this recovery, roughly three in four Class 3 students still cannot read a simple Class 2-level passage, and about two in three Class 3 students and seven in ten Class 5 students still struggle with basic arithmetic. This is the uncomfortable middle ground Indian education sits in: real, measurable progress, layered on top of a foundational learning crisis so deep that “progress” still leaves most children behind grade level.

Teachers: more of them, but not where they are needed

The government’s own UDISE+ data, released this year, shows school education crossing a symbolic threshold — over 1.02 crore teachers nationwide, up from 94.8 lakh just three years earlier. Pupil-teacher ratios have improved across every level and now sit comfortably inside the 30:1 ceiling the National Education Policy recommends. Dropout rates have fallen too: at the secondary level, from 8.2 percent in 2024-25 to 7 percent in 2025-26; at the preparatory level, from 2.3 percent to 1.8 percent over the same year.

Set against this, a Parliamentary Standing Committee report flagged something the aggregate numbers hide — vacancy rates of 30 to 50 percent in central schools like Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, and roughly 10 lakh unfilled teaching posts in Samagra Shiksha-funded state schools, more than 7.5 lakh of them at the elementary level. A national average can look healthy while entire school networks remain understaffed. The pattern recurs across almost every education indicator in India: the country-wide figure moves in the right direction while the distribution underneath it stays deeply uneven, with rural districts, tribal blocks and a handful of states consistently carrying the shortfall.

Higher education’s arithmetic problem

Beyond school, the picture gets harder still. The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education — the share of 18-to-23-year-olds actually enrolled — has climbed from around 24 percent a decade ago to roughly 32-33 percent now. NITI Aayog has said India would need something like 2,500 universities to hit the NEP’s own target of 50 percent GER by 2035; at the current pace of institution-building, that target looks out of reach. India has fewer than 1,400 registered universities today, expanding at a rate that will not double, let alone nearly triple, in time.

The other pillar, told through the same numbers

Education rarely gets discussed alongside its natural twin, but the comparison is instructive precisely because it shows the pattern is not confined to schools and colleges. India’s public health spending has hovered around 1.9 to 2 percent of GDP for years, still short of the National Health Policy’s own 2.5 percent target that was supposed to be met by 2025. The global benchmark the World Health Organization points to for universal health coverage is 5 percent; the worldwide average is closer to 6.7 percent. Union government health spending as a share of GDP has actually fallen in recent budgets even as state governments have picked up more of the load — a near-exact echo of what is happening with education, where rupee totals rise while their share of national output and of the total budget quietly slips.

Put the two pillars side by side and a single story emerges, not of neglect exactly, but of a state that keeps announcing bigger numbers while the underlying commitment — measured against the size of the economy and the scale of need — stays roughly where it always was.

So, is something wrong?

Depending on which slice of data you hold up, you can tell two honest but very different stories about Indian education. One is a story of undeniable movement: more teachers, better pupil-teacher ratios, falling dropout rates, rising rural learning scores, a school system now generating one of the largest integrated education databases anywhere in the world through UDISE+. The other is a story of a system that still asks millions of families to gamble their child’s future on an exam whose integrity keeps failing, that has never come close to the funding levels its own commissions recommended sixty years ago, and where a majority of ten-year-olds still cannot read a book meant for eight-year-olds.

Both stories are true at once. That is, in fact, the most accurate way to describe where Indian education stands in 2026 — not collapsing, not thriving, but a system whose gains keep getting undercut by the parts nobody has fixed for decades: chronic underfunding relative to ambition, an examination architecture that has not scaled with demand, and a persistent gap between what the national average shows and what a child in an under-resourced district actually experiences.

Wangchuk’s hunger strike will end, one way or another, and the news cycle will move to something else. The data underneath it will still be there, largely unchanged, waiting for whoever is willing to look at it honestly — not as a political weapon, but as an unfinished national project that both major pillars of any developing country, education and health, still deserve.

Sources: UDISE+ 2025-26 Report (Ministry of Education);ASER 2024 (Pratham/ASER Centre); Economic Survey 2024-25 and 2025-26; Union Budget documents 2026-27; Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education reports; NITI Aayog statements on higher education; National Health Policy 2017 and WHO benchmarks on health financing;

SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), a deemed-to-be university, has appointed management scholar and academic leader Prof. Sougata Ray as its new Vice Chancellor with effect from July 16, 2026.

Prof. Ray brings more than 35 years of experience in higher education, strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, and corporate governance. Before joining NMIMS, he served as the Thomas Schmidheiny Chaired Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Practice and Executive Director of the Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise at the Indian School of Business (ISB).

Earlier, he held several leadership positions at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta), including Professor of Strategic Management, Dean, and Member of the Board of Governors. He also led the Innovation Lab at Infosys Technologies and has advised businesses, entrepreneurs, and public institutions on strategy, governance, and digital transformation.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, Prof. Ray’s research focuses on strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, digital transformation, and family enterprises. He has authored nearly 200 research papers, books, articles, and case studies.

Announcing the appointment, NMIMS Chancellor Amrish R. Patel said Prof. Ray’s academic leadership and institution-building experience would support the university’s next phase of growth.

Prof. Ray said he looks forward to strengthening research, interdisciplinary learning, innovation, and industry partnerships while preparing students for an AI-driven and rapidly evolving global landscape.

NMIMS said the appointment aligns with its efforts to expand research, entrepreneurship, international collaborations, and technology-enabled education.

India’s efforts to reduce school dropout rates are yielding results. Fewer children are leaving school before completing their education, teacher numbers have reached a record high and schools continue to expand access to basic infrastructure. Yet, the latest Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2025–26 report suggests that while India has made significant progress in bringing children into classrooms, ensuring they stay until the end of school remains a major challenge.

The report, released by the Ministry of Education, covers 14.66 lakh schools, 24.72 crore students and 1.03 crore teachers across the country, offering one of the most comprehensive assessments of India’s school education system.

School Dropout Rates Continue to Fall

The UDISE+ data show a sustained decline in school dropout rates across all stages of education.

At the primary level, the national school dropout rate has fallen to 0.3%, indicating that almost all children who enter primary school continue through the elementary years. The dropout rate stands at 3.6% at the upper primary stage and 9.5% at the secondary stage.

Student progression between school stages has also improved. Nearly 93.8% of students now transition from primary to upper primary education, while 88.3% move from upper primary to secondary school. The transition rate from secondary to higher secondary stands at 78.1%, reflecting gradual improvements in keeping students within the education system.

The figures suggest that programs aimed at improving school access and reducing early school dropouts have helped strengthen enrolment and continuity during the foundational years of education.

The Challenge Shifts to Higher Secondary

Despite these gains, the report reveals that retaining students through higher secondary education remains a significant concern.

National retention rates decline steadily as students move to higher grades. While 91.1% of students remain in school through the primary stage and 83.7% continue through elementary education, retention falls to 69.8% at the secondary stage. By higher secondary, only 51.9% of students remain in the school system.

The data point to an important shift in India’s education landscape. Over the past two decades, policy efforts have largely succeeded in expanding access to schooling. The challenge now is ensuring that students complete their education, particularly during adolescence when the risk of leaving school increases.

The report does not examine why students discontinue their education after secondary school. However, education experts have previously identified factors such as economic pressures, migration, early entry into the workforce, gender-related barriers in some regions and limited access to higher secondary schools as contributing to student attrition.

Teachers and Infrastructure Improve

Teacher availability has also improved across the country.

India now has 1.03 crore teachers, marking an 8.3% increase since 2022–23. Women account for 54.9% of the teaching workforce, while girls represent 48.4% of total student enrolment.

Basic infrastructure has continued to expand. According to the report, 99.5% of schools now have drinking water facilities, 95% have electricity and 99.1% have toilets. Libraries are available in 90.5% of schools, while 69.9% have computers and 67.4% have internet connectivity.

These improvements indicate that access to essential facilities is becoming nearly universal across the country’s school network.

Kerala Highlights Strong School Capacity

Kerala continues to perform strongly on several indicators of school capacity and teacher availability.

The state has 15,750 schools, enrolling about 60.4 lakh students and employing nearly 2.94 lakh teachers. On average, schools in Kerala have 19 teachers, compared with the national average of seven, while average enrolment per school stands at 384 students, more than double the national average of 169.

The state also reports only 67 single-teacher schools, compared with 100,843 across India, reflecting a stronger teacher deployment profile than most states.

Kerala’s Gross Enrolment Ratio remains above the national average across all stages of schooling, indicating sustained participation throughout the school system.

Private Schools Continue to Attract Students

While the UDISE+ report focuses on the status of school education in 2025–26, enrolment trends over recent years indicate a gradual shift towards private unaided schools.

Analyses of successive UDISE+ datasets show that government schools have been losing enrolment, while private schools have gained students. This suggests that even as public schools improve on indicators such as infrastructure, teacher availability and student retention, many families continue to opt for private education.

The report does not attribute reasons for this shift, but it raises important questions about parental preferences, perceived learning quality and the future role of government schools within India’s education system.

The UDISE+ 2025–26 report reflects the changing priorities of India’s school education system. The focus is no longer solely on enrolling children in school. Instead, policymakers now face the challenge of ensuring that students remain in education through higher secondary while also improving the quality of learning.

The declining dropout rates are an important achievement. However, with only about half of students remaining in school until higher secondary, improving completion rates is likely to be the next major test of India’s education policy. At the same time, the continued movement of students towards private schools suggests that expanding access alone may not be enough to strengthen confidence in the public education system.