India's school enrollment drops by over 1 crore in 2023-24 academic year

The Ministry of Education (MoE) recently revealed data showing that, in comparison to previous years, the overall number of students enrolled in 2023–24 decreased by more than a crore.

According to a ministry report on the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+), 24.8 crore students were enrolled in the 2023–24 school year.

The enrollment figures have remained consistent at about 26 million over the past four years.

As the exercise of maintaining a distinct student base is completely different, unique, and incomparable to that of 2021–22 or the other years, education officials have indicated in the report that the data shows some real changes from the past years.

With built-in validation checks, the UDISE+ makes it easy to upload data online at the school level.

Data dependability and timely completion are then guaranteed by additional data verification at the block, district, and state levels.

The overall number of students enrolled in schools was 26.02 crore in 2018–19; this number rose by 1.6% in 2019–20 to surpass 26.45 crore, representing a rise of almost 42 lakh students.

In comparison to 2019–20, enrollments decreased little in 2020–21. There was a 0.76% rise in total enrollment in 2021–22 compared to 2020–21.

In 2012–13, the total number of enrolled students was 26.3 crore.

A decrease of 6% (almost 1.22 crore students) in enrollment was observed in 2022–2023 when there were 25.18 crore registered students and in 2023–2024 when there were 24.8 crore students overall.

In 2022–2023, the MoE launched a revamped UDISE+ ecosystem that records information on over 60 fields for every student.

Additionally, to preserve the child's individuality, Aadhaar details were voluntarily gathered.

According to the most recent statistics, almost 19.7 crore students willingly gave their Aadhaar numbers by 2023–2024.

According to officials, the data from UDISE+ 2022–2023 cannot be directly compared to earlier reports on a number of educational metrics, such as dropout rates, the gross enrollment ratio, and the net enrollment ratio.

More work has been done during 2022–2023 to precisely define both teacher and student credentials in order to eliminate duplicate or ghost entries and specifically identify beneficiaries for different educational programs.

“Apart from Aadhaar, a separate unique educational ID (EID) for every student has been created in the UDISE+ portal to cover each and every child under the ecosystem of UDISE+,” officials said.

“Through the creation of unique student and teacher identities, credentials of individual students and teachers in the education ecosystem can be established more accurately, leading to the weeding out of duplicate or ghost entries, resulting in precise identification of beneficiaries for benefit transfers of the Samagra Shiksha scheme, PM POSHAN scheme, National Scholarship scheme, etc. (and) can bring significant savings to the government in future years,” the report said.

The number of boys enrolled fell from 13.53 crore in 2018–19 to 12.87 crore in 2023–24, a decline of 4.87%, while the number of girls enrolled fell from 12.49 crore in 2018–19 to 11.93 crore in 2023–24, a decrease of 4.48%.

The states with the biggest enrollment declines were Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar.

According to the UDISE+ report statistics for the corresponding years, Bihar's enrollment of more than 2.49 crore students in 2018–19 fell to over 2.13 crore (a decrease of more than 35.65 lakh students).

According to the most recent data, the number of students enrolled in Uttar Pradesh decreased from 4.44 crore in 2018–19 to 4.16 crore, a decrease of 28.26 lakh.

The most recent statistics showed that Maharashtra has 18.55 lakh fewer students—from over 2.32 crore to 2.13 crore.