Prof. Arun C. Mehta’s Critiques of UDISEPlus
Illuminating Methodological Flaws, Data Inconsistencies, and Barriers to Equitable Education in India

Abstract

Prof. Arun C. Mehta, formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Educational Management Information Systems (EMIS) at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), New Delhi, emerges as a preeminent scholar in the critical examination of India’s Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+). Having contributed substantially to the development of its antecedents—DISE and UDISE—spanning the period from 2002 to 2017-18, Mehta’s erudite analyses, disseminated through the platform Education for All in India, rigorously interrogate the 2024-25 UDISE+ dataset, which was released on August 28, 2025. These analyses underscore profound enrollment declines (amounting to 20.56 million at the elementary level), underestimations of dropout rates (potentially concealing 68 lakh cases), infrastructural asymmetries, and opaque methodological frameworks that obfuscate underlying educational inequities.

Beyond mere aggregative summaries, Mehta’s discourse impugns the Data Sharing Policy (DSP) for its propensity to deter rather than facilitate user engagement, the protracted three-year lacuna in the public dissemination of Student Database Management System (SDMS) data, and the unrealized aspirations of a paperless, real-time reporting paradigm. He advocates imperatively for the provision of ready-to-use indicators at cluster, block, and district levels; the substitution of pseudonymous 11-digit school codes with authentic identifiers; the recalculation of dropout rates employing “common schools” baselines; the restoration of NIEPA’s corpus of over 130 legacy publications and raw datasets from 2005-18; the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in system governance coupled with requisite staff capacitation; the resuscitation of capacity-building initiatives reminiscent of EDUSAT programs; an accelerated campaign for digital infrastructure to redress the 35.3% deficit in computer facilities; elucidations regarding the shift in reference dates from September 30 to March 31; and an impartial audit addressing declines in school numbers, enrollment irregularities, and the proliferation of private unaided institutions.

This article synthesizes Mehta’s 2025 scholarship, elucidating UDISE+’s disjuncture with the equity imperatives of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, while proffering reforms to cultivate granular and transparent data architectures.

Introduction

The trajectory of India’s educational landscape, predicated upon the tenets of NEP 2020 and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009), presupposes the availability of veridical data to eradicate impediments to access, retention, and pedagogical efficacy. Nevertheless, UDISE+—inaugurated in 2018-19 as the digitized successor to DISE and UDISE-labors under the encumbrance of methodological ambiguities and infrastructural deficiencies, as meticulously delineated in the post-retirement of Prof. Arun C. Mehta.

As a distinguished NIEPA savant instrumental in the orchestration of EMIS frameworks, Mehta’s corpus exceeding 20 analytical expositions since 2020 deploys statistical acuity to deconstruct the veneer of officialdom encasing the 2024-25 report: encompassing 24.69 crore students across 1.47 million institutions, a teaching complement of 1.01 crore, and ostensible reductions in dropout rates to 0.8%, set against erosions in enrollment and lacunae in digital connectivity (63.5% prevalence). Disseminated through September 2025 communiqués, his critiques encompass deficits in human capacity—manifest in the inadequate preparation of headmasters (HMs), educators, and data respondents—and the Ministry of Education’s (MoE) unarticulated reconfiguration of reference dates from September 30 to March 31, which impedes the realization of real-time functionalities.

Invoking the paradigmatic successes of NIEPA’s EDUSAT initiatives (2005-18), Mehta propounds the imperative for interactive professional development, ubiquitous digital enablement, and AI augmentation to instantiate UDISE+’s purported paperless paradigm, thereby ensuring that data serves as an instrument of empowerment rather than evasion in the pursuit of equity.

Enrollment Dynamics:  The Pressures of Privatization

In his seminal treatise Why School Enrolment Hit a 7-Year Low in UDISE+ 2024-25 (September 12, 2025), Mehta conceptualizes the 20.56 million diminution in elementary enrollment—from 2021-22 to 2024-25—as an exigent systemic indicator, wherein primary gross enrollment ratios (GER) precipitously descend from exceedance of 100% to 90.9%, with elementary aggregates similarly contracting to 90.6%. Corresponding net enrollment ratios evince even greater disparities—76.4% at the primary stage and 47.5% in secondary education—disclosing phenomena of age-incongruent matriculations and socio-economic marginalizations disproportionately impacting Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes/Other Backward Classes (SC/ST/OBC) demographics. Mehta ascribes these vicissitudes to institutional consolidations, demographic vicissitudes, and the amalgamation of SDMS with Aadhaar protocols, presaging the subversion of NEP’s 2030 universalization objectives amid a 13.4% attrition rate in secondary progression.

Contrasting these findings with the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024’s documentation of 66.8% attendance in government institutions for children aged 6-14, Mehta castigates UDISE+’s dissociation from learning attainments, positing that observed trajectories signify not enhancements in data probity but auguries of entrenched inequities within agrarian blocs. The ascendance of the private unaided sector—constituting 37% of of total I-XII enrolment—exacerbates this disequilibrium, necessitating an autonomous audit of volatile enrollment configurations, institutional rationalizations, and enrollment instabilities by an entity extraneous to MoE, with paramount emphasis on probity over procedural adherence.

Underestimation of Dropout Rates: Methodological Opacity and the Imperative of “Common Schools”

Within Does UDISE+ Underestimate Dropout Rates? (2025), Mehta unveils a ostensibly halved incidence—from 5.4 million at the elementary level in 2023-24 to 2.5 million in 2024-25—while extrapolating a latent aggregate of 68.16 lakh across Classes 1-10, amalgamating 25.42 lakh elementary and 42.74 lakh secondary attributions. Subsequent to the 2022-23 inflection, the adoption of individualized student tracking supersedes aggregative “common schools” paradigms (prevalent 2005-18), engendering incommensurable retention metrics (e.g., 92% at elementary stages) predicated upon unverifiable antecedents such as 2020-21 enrollments. Anomalous nullifications—such as zero primary dropouts in Telangana and Uttar Pradesh—betoken implausibility within contexts of facultative submissions and ministerial caveats regarding lacunae.

Mehta exhorts a restitution to flux-based computations anchored in “common schools” (i.e., longitudinally persistent institutions), repudiating all-encompassing institutional baselines that attenuate attrition quanta, thereby furnishing authentic metrics conducive to interventions at the cluster stratum. This methodological recalibration, he contends, constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for NEP’s retention imperatives, laying bare the manner in which extant obfuscations perpetuate a 13.4% effluence in secondary articulations.

Infrastructural Disparities, Pedagogical Equity, and Subnational Accessibility Deficits

Mehta’s Analysis of UDISE+ 2024-25 Data (September 2025) exposes the tenuousness of infrastructural provisions: 82% of institutions ostensibly equipped with facilities for female sanitation, albeit with rural operationality languishing below 45%; accommodations for Children with Special Needs (CWSN) at 80%; and digital permeation at 58%. Indices of teacher apportionment evince modest amelioration (pupil-teacher ratio: 24:1 in secondary education), yet 12% of secondary venues persist as solitary-teacher enclaves, with adjunctive contractual arrangements perpetuating asymmetries at the block level. Disaggregations of Other Backward Classes (OBC) enrollments (42% in toto, diminishing in higher secondary) interweave infrastructural scarcities with mechanisms of social occlusion.

The hegemony of aggregation provokes Mehta’s ire: bereft of preconfigured indicators encompassing access, equity, and retention at cluster, block, and district strata—coterminous with state and national exemplars—subnational custodians are consigned to improvisational exigencies. He denounces the pseudonymization of 11-digit codes, advocating their substitution with veritable identifiers to enable traceability, and indicts the DSP as an impediment to scholarly ingress, sequestering exhaustive datasets (save for privacy-proscribed elements such as telephonic and electronic addresses) within circumscribed veils.

Human Capacity Augmentation, Digital Enablement, and the Elusory Paperless Paradigm

Grounded in his EMIS patrimony, Mehta bewails deficits in human resource preparedness: the paucity of divulged professional development for HMs, pedagogues, or respondents subsequent to 2023-24 imperils the integrity of the circa 70-field Data Capture Format (DCF). The EDUSAT odyssey of NIEPA (2005-18)—interactive telecasts acclaimed for fostering respondent interactivity—furnishes a restorative archetype, engendering adherence during DISE’s incubatory epoch. He adjures MoE-mandated perennial confluences (e.g., virtual seminars, territorial colloquiums) for 10.1 million instructional personnel, calibrated through indices of pedagogical efficacy.

The avowed paperless covenant of UDISE+ resonates as chimerical: 64.7% institutional computerization (an increment of 7.5% inter-annually), 63.5% networked, notwithstanding 99,184 inoperable apparatuses and over 25,000 unelectrified precincts, which propel peregrinations of infrastructural desperation. Amidst the proliferation of adjunctive portals (SDMS, APAAR), Mehta imperatively solicits an expedited digitization offensive—fiscally underwritten materiel, plenary broadband ingress by 2027—to obviate analogical impositions, instantiating “Digitisation for All” and attenuating error incidences by 30%.

Tertian into the SDMS inception (2022-23), the sterility of public student delineations—despite the surveillance of 26 crore learner trajectories—epitomizes opacity; Mehta presses for depersonalized promulgations consonant with DSP strictures, eschewing breaches of confidentiality.

Methodological Lucidity: Reconfigurations of Reference, Impediments to Realtime, and Paradigmatic Innovations

The MoE’s sub silentio transmutation of reference chronologies—from September 30 (ante-2022) to March 31 (post-2022)—evades scholarly interrogation, as Mehta observes, synchronizing fiscal cadences yet engorging mid-term enumerations and occluding migratory fluxions. For the 2025-26 iteration, he proposes amalgamative or declarative stratagems to equilibrate currency and fidelity.

Pretensions to realtime veracity founder: 2024-25 promulgations lag biennially, encumbered by corroborative constrictions, facultative procrastinations, and competency scarcities yielding 95% encompassment devoid of dynamism. Mehta enumerates encumbrances—synchronization malfunctions, post-pandemic arrearages—and ordains palliatives: AI-orchestrated aberration discernment, prognosticative simulacra of institutional cessations and enrollments, and personnel empowerment. UDISE+ and SDMS are enjoined to instrumentalize AI in administrative stewardship, capacitated through bespoke pedagogy, transfiguring impediments into precincts of exactitude.

Restitution of Patrimony and Systemic Scrutiny: Reappropriating NIEPA’s Legacy

Mehta’s peroration extends to archival restitution: MoE is duty-bound to repatriate NIEPA’s 130+ reprots on DISE/UDISE (2005-18) and unprocessed 2005-06 to 2017-18 corpora to UDISE+ repositories, as NIEPA’s digital bastion vacillates and domains succumb to extraneous appropriations, fracturing diachronic continuities. Covenants betwixt NIEPA and MoE for quinquennial to septenary exegetical compendia would resuscitate hermeneutic vitality, subservient to Article 21A of the Constitution.

An autonomous scrutiny—extricated from MoE entanglements—of scholastic contractions, enrollment idiosyncrasies, and privatized proliferations is incontrovertible, Mehta avows, with ameliorative refinement as its apotheosis.

Concluding Observations

Prof. Mehta’s 2025 exegeses—encompassing abyssal enrollments, duplicitous dropout delineations, illusory infrastructures, capacitative chasms, and digital simulacra—transcend mere empiricism, constituting a forensic arraignment of UDISE+’s equity shortfall. Through imperatives for granular indicia, methodological transparency, AI infusions, EDUSAT resurrections, and impartial inquisitions, he delineates a redemptive cartography: a regime wherein data irradiates asymmetries rather than interring them. In their default, NEP 2020 courts ideational abstraction over substantive fruition, relegating 68 lakh specters and 20 million interstices to archival obscurity. Mehta’s intellectual bequest resounds as an exigent summons: the informatics of education must metamorphose from archival guardianship to catalytic agency, lest inequities ossify within unprobed penumbras.

Education for All in India