Nearly 8,000 schools across India had no students enrolled during the 2024-25 academic year, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Education. Despite this, these schools together employed over 20,000 teachers, showing a major gap between the number of teachers and the actual student strength.

West Bengal had the most schools without students, recording 3,812 such institutions that still had 17,965 teachers on staff. Telangana came next with 2,245 schools and 1,016 teachers, while Madhya Pradesh had 463 schools employing 223 teachers. In Uttar Pradesh, 81 schools were found to have zero enrolment.

The situation has improved compared to last year, when 12,954 schools had no students. This number has dropped to 7,993 in 2024-25, a decline of about 38 per cent.

Several states have managed to avoid this problem completely. Haryana, Maharashtra, Goa, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura all reported no schools with zero enrolment. The same goes for Union Territories such as Delhi, Puducherry, Lakshadweep, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Daman and Diu.

A senior official said, “School education is a state subject. States have been advised to tackle the issue of zero-enrolment schools, and some have merged schools to optimise both infrastructure and staff utilisation.”

In Uttar Pradesh, authorities have started taking strict measures. The Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad has announced plans to withdraw recognition from schools that have shown zero enrolment for three years in a row.

The data also points to another serious concern. Across India, there are over one lakh single-teacher schools where more than 33 lakh students are enrolled. Andhra Pradesh leads in the number of such schools, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Lakshadweep.

When it comes to student numbers in these single-teacher schools, Uttar Pradesh ranks the highest, followed by Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh. Overall, the number of single-teacher schools has gone down by about 6 per cent, from 1,18,190 in 2022-23 to 1,10,971 in 2023-24.