Role of Private and Government Aided Schools in Indian Education System: UDISE+ 2024-25 

Introduction

India’s school education system is undergoing one of the most profound structural transformations since Independence. Between 2021–22 and 2024–25, the share of total enrolment accommodated in private unaided recognised schools has surged from 31.1 per cent to 38.8 per cent – an increase of nearly 25 per cent in relative terms within just four years – while the institutional base of these schools has grown only marginally from 22.6 per cent to 23.1 per cent of all recognised institutions. This dramatic shift has been driven not by a rapid proliferation of new private schools but by their consistently larger average size and by an accelerating parental preference that now spans rural and urban areas alike. At the same time, the historically significant government-aided sector – once a cornerstone of equitable expansion and a buffer between fully public and fully private provision – has entered a phase of slow but unmistakable contraction, with its institutional share declining from 5.54 per cent to 5.40 per cent and its enrolment share beginning to erode in the most recent year.

These trends carry far-reaching implications for social justice and educational equity. Government schools remain the primary, and often the only, avenue of formal schooling for the country’s most disadvantaged children – Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, religious minorities, girls from conservative households, and economically weaker sections. As private unaided enrolment expands fastest in states that are home to the largest concentrations of these very populations (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and large parts of eastern India), the risk of a deepening socio-economic segregation of schooling becomes acute. Low-fee private schools may appear affordable to some strata in rural India, but their proliferation often comes at the expense of quality regulation, teacher security, and inclusive admission practices, thereby reinforcing rather than mitigating existing inequalities.

The National Education Policy 2020 explicitly positioned the strengthening of public education as its central organising principle, envisioning a future in which high-quality government schools become the preferred choice for most Indian families. Its companion operational framework, the Samagra Shiksha scheme, was redesigned to support school consolidation, infrastructure upgradation, teacher professional development, and equity-focused interventions with precisely this reversal in mind. Yet the empirical record of the first four years of NEP implementation, as revealed by successive rounds of UDISE+ data, presents a sobering counterpoint: the flight from public institutions has not slowed; it has accelerated, and the gap between policy ambition and ground reality has widened.

The analysis presented in this article, grounded exclusively in the UDISE+ data for 2021–22 to 2024–25, documents the pace, mechanisms, and regional variation of this ongoing marketisation of school education. By examining trends at the all-India level and disaggregating patterns across states and union territories, it illuminates the critical fault lines – geographical, institutional, and socio-economic – that will determine whether India succeeds in realising NEP 2020’s promise of an equitable, inclusive, and publicly anchored education system, or whether it drifts irreversibly toward a stratified, privately dominated landscape whose long-term consequences for social cohesion and universal secondary education remain profoundly uncertain.

Data Sources and Limitations

This article relies on UDISEPlus data compiled by the Ministry of Education, which provides comprehensive school-level statistics for all states and union territories of India. Limitations include variability in state reporting quality, possible undercounting in the private and aided sectors, and limited qualitative indicators of education quality.

Literature Review

The increasing prominence of the private sector in Indian school education has been debated in scholarly and policy circles, including on educationforallinindia.com. Balancing private participation with equitable access remains key under NEP 2020’s vision. This article contributes data-driven insights to these discussions.

Changing Landscape of Private and Government-Aided Schooling in India

All-India Trends, 2021–22 to 2024–25

Over the four years from 2021–22 to 2024–25, the structure of elementary and secondary schooling in India has undergone a subtle but significant reconfiguration in favour of private unaided institutions. The proportion of private unaided schools among the total number of recognised institutions rose from 22.56 per cent in 2021–22 to 23.08 per cent in 2024–25, an increase of approximately half a percentage point. This modest institutional expansion, however, masks a far more dramatic transformation in enrolment patterns. The share of total enrolment in private unaided schools surged from 31.1 per cent in 2021–22 to 38.8 per cent in 2024–25, representing a remarkable gain of 7.7 percentage points in just four years and a relative increase of nearly 25 per cent over the base-year figure. The average private school thus grew substantially larger relative to its government counterpart: the enrolment-to-institution ratio for private unaided schools climbed from 1.38 in 2021–22 to 1.68 by 2023–24 and stabilised at that elevated level in 2024–25.

Government-aided schools present a contrasting trajectory. Their share of total institutions declined steadily from 5.54 per cent in 2021–22 to 5.40 per cent in 2024–25, reflecting both the closure or merger of older aided institutions and the near-complete cessation of new grants-in-aid in most states. Despite this institutional contraction, aided schools continued to serve a disproportionately large student population, with an enrolment-to-institution ratio ranging from 1.81 to 1.95 across the period, consistently higher than that of private unaided schools. This persistently high ratio underscores the historical legacy of aided schools as relatively large, well-established institutions, often located in urban and semi-urban areas and enjoying considerable community trust. A slight dip in their enrolment share from 10.6 per cent in 2023–24 to 10.0 per cent in 2024–25 suggests, however, that the long-term decline in the aided sector is now beginning to affect student numbers as well.

The widening gap between the institutional share and the enrolment share of private unaided schools constitutes the most striking structural shift revealed by the data. By 2024–25, private unaided institutions, which comprise less than one-fourth of all schools, will educate nearly two-fifths of India’s recognised school student population. This growing concentration of enrolment in a relatively stable (and only marginally expanding) private-school base points to three inter-related phenomena: (i) strong and increasing parental preference for private schooling, (ii) a pronounced tendency for newly established or expanding private schools to operate at significantly higher average enrolments than government schools, and (iii) a corresponding pressure on the public and aided sectors, whose combined share of enrolment fell from 58.9 percent in 2021–22 to approximately 51.2 percent in 2024–25.

In summary, the UDISE+ data for the period 2021–22 to 2024–25 document an accelerating marketisation of school education at the all-India level. Private unaided providers have consolidated their position not through a rapid proliferation of new institutions but through a dramatic intensification of their enrolment share, driven by larger average school sizes and sustained parental demand. Government-aided institutions, while still educationally significant, are on a clear path of slow institutional and (now emerging) enrolment decline. These trends collectively signal a deepening dualism in Indian schooling, in which a numerically minority private sector increasingly dominates the actual delivery of education to children

One of the most revealing yet under-appreciated dimensions of India’s ongoing educational transformation is the dramatic variation in average school size across management types and regions. This variation explains why enrolment shares have shifted toward the private sector far more rapidly than the mere count of institutions would suggest.

At the all-India level between 2021–22 and 2024–25, a startling reversal occurred in the relative size of private unaided and government-aided schools. In 2021–22, the average private unaided school enrolled 735 students – more than twice the size of the average government-aided school (321) and four times the national average across all schools (178). By 2022–23, however, this figure collapsed to 260, and it remained between 244 and 282 through 2024–25, settling at virtually identical averages for private unaided (282) and government-aided schools (312). This abrupt drop almost certainly reflects a methodological refinement in UDISE+ reporting rather than a genuine contraction of private schools; large numbers of small, previously under-reported or unrecognised private institutions (especially low-fee rural and semi-urban schools) appear to have been brought into the official database from 2022–23 onward. The stabilised 2024–25 national average of 282 students per private school – 67 per cent above the all-school average of 168 – nevertheless confirms that private unaided institutions remain significantly larger than the typical government school, thereby sustaining their disproportionate share of total enrolment (38.8 per cent) despite constituting only 23.1 per cent of all institutions. State-level data for 2024–25 expose an even richer geography of school size and its implications for educational markets and public policy.

Average Students per School at All India Level: 2021-22 to 2024-25

The north-eastern states again stand out for extreme concentration within the private sector. Although average private school size is modest in absolute terms (63 in Mizoram, 163 in Nagaland, 202 in Manipur), these figures are three to five times larger than the tiny government schools that dominate sparsely populated hilly terrain (overall averages of 22–69 students). The result, as previously noted, is that private institutions – often mission-run or community-initiated – enrol 77–88 per cent of all students, despite never exceeding 30 per cent of the total number of schools.

A second cluster of states reveals huge government-aided schools, a legacy of historical grant-in-aid policies that favoured well-established missionary, linguistic, or community institutions. Chhattisgarh records the national extreme of 1,960 students per aided school, followed distantly by Chandigarh (590), Dadra & Nagar Haveli (434), and Arunachal Pradesh (300). These outliers explain why aided schools in several states continue to command enrolment shares far exceeding their institutional footprint, even as the aided sector contracts nationally.

The large northern and southern states where private unaided schooling has expanded most vigorously display more moderate but still significant size advantages. Delhi (763), Andhra Pradesh (304), Bihar (261), Kerala (270), and Jharkhand (351) all have private schools that are 50–100 per cent (or more) larger than the state average. In Uttar Pradesh, by contrast, the average private school is tiny (60 students), yet even this modest size is sufficient to produce a 39.8 per cent institutional share, because government schools remain relatively large (163 on average). Haryana’s private schools (176 vs. state average 102) and Tamil Nadu’s (195 vs. 216) further illustrate that private expansion need not always depend on substantial individual institutions; consistent size premia of 70–100 students are enough to drive rapid enrolment shifts over time.

At the opposite end lie states where private (and sometimes aided) schools remain conspicuously small, constraining their enrolment impact even when their numerical presence is notable. West Bengal (private: 78), Rajasthan (104), Punjab (105), Madhya Pradesh (107), Himachal Pradesh (108), and several north-eastern and union territories (Tripura 26, Puducherry 44, Sikkim 64, Meghalaya 65) all host private institutions that are either smaller than or barely larger than government schools. In these contexts, private sector growth remains institutionally diffuse rather than enrolment-intensive, often reflecting regulatory environments, land constraints, or limited fee-paying capacity among households.

The national and state-level patterns of average enrolment per school thus illuminate the mechanisms behind India’s uneven privatisation. Where private (or historically aided) schools are substantially larger than government institutions – whether in the north-eastern hills, the southern plains, or the National Capital Region – the private sector captures enrolment shares two to three times its institutional share. Where private schools remain small or only marginally larger than government ones, their enrolment impact is muted despite sometimes impressive numerical proliferation. The size differential, more than the raw count of private institutions, has become the principal engine of marketisation in Indian school education. As long as private providers continue to operate with enrolments 60–400 per cent above local government norms in most major states, the shift of children from public to private institutions will accelerate even if the relative number of private schools grows only slowly.

This structural feature – rooted in parental demand, regulatory permissiveness, and the economies of scale available to non-government providers – constitutes one of the most powerful yet least discussed drivers of India’s evolving educational dualism.

Concluding Observations

India’s Evolving School Education Landscape in the Light of NEP 2020

The UDISE+ data from 2021–22 to 2024–25, read together, tell a coherent and sobering story: India is experiencing an accelerating structural shift of children from public to private systems that is driven far less by the numerical proliferation of private schools than by their consistently larger average size and the sustained parental preference this reflects. By 2024–25, private unaided institutions, constituting only 23 per cent of all schools, educate nearly 39 per cent of children  –  a seven-percentage-point gain in just four years. Government-aided schools, once a vital bridge between public funding and private management, are in slow but unmistakable decline both institutionally and, now, in enrolment share. The average private school is 67 per cent larger than the national norm, and in several states the ratio exceeds 2.5 or even 3.0. This “size premium” has become the primary mechanism of marketisation.

The National Education Policy 2020 explicitly sought to arrest and reverse the erosion of trust in public education. Its core instruments for doing so — the consolidation of tiny schools into composite school complexes, massive investment in infrastructure and teacher capacity, the promise of “public-spirited” philanthropic and non-profit private participation, and the creation of an enabling regulatory environment that would prioritise learning outcomes over profit  –  have so far proved insufficient to halt, let alone reverse, the trends documented here. Parental choice continues to flow overwhelmingly toward private providers wherever household resources permit, and the public system, despite pockets of excellence (Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, parts of Kerala), is losing ground fastest in precisely those states where socio-economic transformation is most rapid.

States requiring urgent policy attention fall into three distinct categories:

1. High-privatisation, low-public-trust states where the private size premium is already extreme and still growing: Haryana (62% private enrolment), Andhra Pradesh (56%), Manipur (65%), Mizoram (77%), Nagaland (88%), Sikkim (81%), and Puducherry (57%). In most of these jurisdictions, the public system risks becoming residualised within a single generation unless dramatic improvements in quality and perception are achieved.
2. Large populous states where private enrolment is expanding rapidly from a modest base and where the sheer demographic weight makes national trends sensitive to local outcomes: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan, and West Bengal. These eight states together account for roughly 45 per cent of India’s school-age population. In several of them, the private sector is still institutionally small or operates at modest average size, but the direction of travel is unmistakable. Any serious national effort to strengthen public education must succeed here, or it will fail everywhere.
3. States with historically strong aided sectors whose gradual contraction threatens to push students into either an unregulated private market or a weakened public system: Kerala, Maharashtra, Goa, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. The aided school model — once the pride of Indian education — is no longer being replenished. As these institutions age and close, parents’ choices will increasingly be between an under-resourced government school and a fully private, unaided one, with predictable consequences.

NEP 2020’s vision of a revitalised public education system that becomes the first choice for most parents remains achievable, but only if the policy instruments are radically recalibrated in scale, speed, and political priority. The data presented here constitute a clear early-warning signal: in the absence of a visible, outcome-driven turnaround in the quality, accountability, and attractiveness of government (and remaining aided) schools — especially in the eight large northern and eastern states and the high-privatisation north-eastern cluster — India is on a trajectory toward a low-fee private-dominated school system whose equity, quality, and constitutional implications have yet to be fully confronted. The next five years will determine whether NEP 2020 becomes the instrument that reverses the drift or merely the policy document that chronicled it.

Suggested Readings and References

• Privatisation in Indian Education: Challenges and Opportunities
• UDISEPlus Annual Reports 2021-22 to 2024-25
• National Education Policy 2020 Full Document
• Samagra Shiksha Scheme

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