According to the Elementary Education in India 2005-06, over 32,000 schools or almost 3 per cent schools do not have a single student.
The survey covered over 11 lakh schools in 35 states and union territories and found that Karnataka was the worst with almost 8,000 schools without a single student.
(The State Government has subsequently come out with a denial of this information. Blaming the inflated figure to a computer error, the ministry has given the new number as 339.)
The survey also found that 6 per cent schools, mostly in Bihar, Delhi, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, had less than 25 students. Twenty-three thousand schools don't have a single teacher and more than a lakh schools had just one teacher.
It is ironical that this report should have come days before the country was poised to celebrate its 60th birthday. With a quarter of the country still illiterate and millions of children still out of school, this shameful waste of precious resources does make the tax payer furious with anger. And that is a good thing because ultimately if anything is going to bring about a change in the education scene it has to be through the initiative of the informed section of the society.
 Nobel laureate Amartya Sen calls it the “astonishing neglect of elementary education in India”. Even though the right to education is incorporated in the constitution, our leaders did not have the foresight to give the sector the attention that was needed. Consequently, like the undernourished children it catered to, even at age 50, the government sponsored education remained stunted in growth and development.
It was only in the beginning of the nineties that the policy makers woke up to the seriousness of the issue. The Supreme Court of India in its historic judgement in 1993 has held that all citizens have a fundamental right to education up to the age of 14 years.
The Government of India subsequently introduced the 83rd Constitutional Amendment Bill in Parliament in 1997 to make education a fundamental right of all children up to the age of 6-14 years.
One reason why the neglect happened was the general misconception that literacy was a corollary of economic well being and that the improvement in one would automatically get reflected in the other. It has long been held that poverty is a double edged sword. The parents could neither spend on the school related expenditure nor could they manage to make ends meet without the child’s earnings. Sop schemes like midday meals and free distribution of books etc were launched to help the poor parents. An act was passed banning child labour and this was expected to improve school attendance.
Subsequent research findings of various surveys however firmly established that poverty does not play the decisive role. Statistical data from the two States of Kerala and UP was presented to firmly demolish the myth. In both the States, the proportion of children below the poverty line is the same. But whereas Kerala has achieved 100% success, UP recorded a dismal 40%!
Another important fact brought out by the surveys has been that there is a significant group of children that is neither at school nor is working; and that there is a heavy drop out from as early as class 2.
But the biggest surprise was that 98 % of the parents of boys and 89% of parents of girls who were themselves poor and illiterate parents said that they wanted their boys and girls to go to study and study ‘as long as they could’. And all of them said that the drop out happened because of the low quality of education provided in the government schools. With education becoming a meaningless exercise, child labour was default happening.
The government has, particularly over the last 15 years declared education as a thrust sector. Figures are showing some improvement but there is much that needs to be done. Given the demographic status of India as a young country, our education sector is indeed a Goliath when compared to that of the other developed countries. The only way to conquer the demon of illiteracy is through a national arousal. Increased community participation and NGO involvement in effective school management and supervision could bring in the desired changes. But for any good to happen we first need to have a system where there is accountability and transparency.