By: Kushal Raj Chakravorty, Founder and Managing Trustee, Lotus Petal Foundation
India’s education story has always been, at its heart, a story of scale. Millions of children enter classrooms every year across geographies, languages and socio-economic backgrounds. Over the years, significant progress has been made in bringing children into the formal education system.
The question before us now is equally important: once a child enters a classroom, are we enabling them to learn, grow and build a future from that opportunity?
Access to education is the essential first step. Empowerment begins when that access translates into meaningful learning.
A System Built at Remarkable Scale
The UDISE+ 2025–26 data offers a sense of the extraordinary scale at which India’s school education system operates. The country now has nearly 14.67 lakh schools, more than 1.03 crore teachers and over 24.72 crore enrolled students.
Managing an education system of this size is an achievement in itself. But these numbers also remind us that improving educational outcomes in India cannot depend on isolated interventions. Meaningful change has to strengthen an ecosystem that reaches children across almost every part of the country.
The progress made on access gives us a strong foundation. The next challenge is ensuring that the experience and outcomes of education improve alongside it.
Access Is Improving, but It Is Only the Beginning
There are encouraging signs. UDISE+ 2025–26 reports a Gross Enrolment Ratio of 89.6% at the Middle stage and 71.7% at the Secondary stage. Teacher availability is another important part of this picture, with pupil-teacher ratios of 10:1 at the Foundational stage, 12:1 at Preparatory, 17:1 at Middle and 21:1 at Secondary level.
These indicators tell us something important about the capacity being created within the system. But enrolment and availability alone cannot tell us whether a child is receiving a quality education.
A seat in a classroom creates access. What happens inside and around that classroom determines whether access becomes opportunity.
What Happens Inside the Classroom Matters
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 adds another dimension to this picture by looking at education at the household and child level in rural India.
Among five-year-olds, participation in some form of pre-primary education increased from 58.5% in 2018 to 71.4% in 2024. Student attendance in government primary schools also rose from 72.4% in 2018 to 75.9% in 2024, while teacher attendance increased from 85.1% to 87.5% over the same period.
These shifts matter because regular participation is fundamental to learning. At the same time, they reinforce the need to look beyond whether children are present in school to what they are actually able to learn there.
From Access to Learning Outcomes
This shift from access to quality is increasingly visible in the national education conversation as well.
In May 2026, NITI Aayog released School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement. Drawing on a decade of education data, including UDISE+, ASER, the National Achievement Survey and PARAKH, the report examines India’s progress across access, equity and inclusion, and quality.
Importantly, it also identifies persistent challenges, from infrastructure and teacher workforce management to foundational learning, pedagogy, student well-being and educational continuity.
This distinction is important. India’s education challenge today is not simply about getting children into school. It is about ensuring that the years they spend there result in meaningful learning.
Strengthening the Systems That Already Reach Children
The scale of India’s education system also teaches us that no single institution can solve the challenge of educational equity independently.
Government schools serve millions of children, including many from communities where access to other educational opportunities may be limited. Strengthening these schools can therefore create an impact far beyond what any parallel system could achieve.
Technology Can Expand the Geography of Opportunity
Technology is also changing what educational access can mean.
A good teacher no longer necessarily needs to be in the same physical location as every child they teach. Digital classrooms and live interactive learning can enable academic resources and subject expertise to reach students across districts and states, including schools where such resources may otherwise be difficult to access.
But technology should remain an enabler, not a substitute for good teaching. Providing a screen or an internet connection is not, by itself, digital inclusion. What matters is whether technology improves the learning experience, enables teachers to reach students effectively and gives children access to knowledge and opportunities that were previously beyond their reach.
Used thoughtfully, technology gives us an opportunity to reduce the role geography plays in determining the quality of education available to a child.
From Learning to Possibility
Ultimately, the purpose of education extends beyond school.
Children should leave the education system with the ability to navigate higher education, employment and adult life with confidence. This requires strong academic foundations, but also communication, problem-solving, digital literacy, career awareness and exposure to possibilities they may not encounter within their immediate surroundings.
For children who may be the first in their families to complete school or pursue higher education, such exposure becomes particularly important. They may have ambition and ability but limited access to professional networks, career guidance or information about the pathways available to them.
Schools, therefore, have an important role in widening not only a child’s knowledge, but also their sense of what is possible.
From Opportunity to Empowerment
Taken together, UDISE+, ASER and the recent NITI Aayog analysis tell us a larger story. India has built educational access at extraordinary scale. There are improvements in several important indicators, but there are also persistent questions around learning, equity, continuity and the quality of the educational experience.
The next chapter must focus on converting access into outcomes.
Achieving this will require government, educators, communities, civil society and the private sector to work together. Each has a different role, but the measure of success must ultimately remain the same: “what changes for the child.”
After years of working with children from underserved communities, I have come to believe that the most meaningful measure of education is not simply whether a child enters school, but whether education expands the choices available to that child. That is the journey from opportunity to empowerment. And that is when access to education begins to fulfil its real promise.
