Beyond the coaching hubs: The neglected realities of Rajasthan’s village classrooms

By Aravind Yadappanavar* 

Rajasthan’s government-school network is trapped in a profound systemic paradox. While student enrolment has steadily eroded, the state continues to wrestle with a crippling deficit of basic infrastructure, hazardous school structures, severe teacher-deployment distortions, and a glaring absence of basic utilities. In rural and desert outposts, the reality of public education unfolds not in equipped classrooms, but under rusted tin sheets, beneath the shade of trees, inside cramped rented rooms, and occasionally within animal sheds. In some habitations, school gates remain locked entirely.

The human cost of this neglect is both real and devastating. In Piplodi village of Jhalawar district, seven children were killed when a dilapidated school structure gave way. A year later, a replacement building has yet to be completed, leaving a tragic monument to administrative apathy. While an eight-classroom facility with a kitchen is rising elsewhere in the district, 81 local schools still lack basic sanitation, mirroring a state-wide pattern where identified structural hazards are rarely met with swift reconstruction.

​The contraction of Rajasthan’s government schooling mirrors broader national shifts, driven by dipping birth rates, rural-to-urban migration, and an accelerating flight toward private institutions. Between 2018 and 2024 alone, 2,361 state-run schools shut their doors. Concurrently, student retention remains fragile. The state records a dropout rate of 3.6% at the primary level, 4.6% at the middle level, and 7.5% in secondary classes, with adolescent boys dropping out at a markedly higher rate of 8.4% compared to 6.5% for girls.

​Yet, this steady retreat of students has unfolded alongside an expanding teaching cadre. Across more than one lakh schools, the state employs 7,93,158 teachers for roughly 1.5 crore students, yielding an apparently comfortable average ratio of one teacher to twenty pupils. This statewide metric, however, conceals stark ground disparities. Roughly 140 schools across Rajasthan have zero enrolled students but retain 189 teachers on their rosters. At the other extreme, approximately 7,200 institutions operate as single-teacher schools, collectively shouldering the education of over 1.78 lakh children. Even as the total teacher roll grew from 7.75 lakh to over 7.93 lakh, misallocation has left an estimated 23,000 instructors posted in locations where they are redundant, while understaffed rural schools languish.

​Physical infrastructure remains an equally fragile pillar. Official records identify 611 schools operating entirely without their own buildings, with ten districts accounting for 57% of these unhoused institutions. Independent ground assessments paint an even grimmer portrait: 1,088 structures stand in advanced states of dilapidation, 611 are completely ruined, and hundreds of individual classrooms have been officially condemned as unsafe. Yet, remediation moves at a crawl, with only 41 condemned structures and 29 partial blocks demolished so far.

​This physical decay spans both major urban centres and remote frontiers. In Kota, celebrated nationally as an intensive coaching hub, a government upper-primary school on MBS Road established in 2024 accommodates 78 primary students across six municipal kiosks and beneath an open tin shed. The school has no permanent sanction for faculty, relying on three deputed teachers, while children navigate scorching heat under corrugated iron. In Shivanagar, a government Sanskrit school founded in 2018 serves a catchment area of 60,000 residents from a single rented room via an unpaved muddy approach, counting merely eight to ten students.

​In Barmer, over 2,047 schools operate without toilets and 36 have no buildings at all, leaving children at settlements like Azad Nagar to gather beneath trees while facing chronic shortages of government-supplied nutrition such as milk powder. In neighbouring Jaisalmer, classes assemble in the open air, underscoring the deep logistical vulnerabilities of desert communities.

​Jaipur district reveals similar distress. Assessments indicate 3,768 school buildings in precarious conditions. At Kalyanpura, 404 students are squeezed into four deteriorating rooms, forcing the school to split into two compressed shifts from dawn to dusk without reliable running water or adequate perimeter security. At another upper-primary facility in the district, 85 students share four rooms dependent entirely on an erratic water tanker, with the campus frequently found locked well past morning opening hours. In Bhojyawas, where ten primary students and a single teacher share premises with a rural sub-health centre, broken water tanks, persistent mould, and waterlogged medical registers have normalized open defecation. Elsewhere in Jaipur, classes were conducted out of a buffalo shed for two and a half years after the primary building was deemed uninhabitable.

​Beyond structural integrity, the technological and sanitary divide remains wide. Statewide, 11.7% of government schools lack functioning toilets, 1,049 schools have no drinking water sources, 58.2%—amounting to over 40,690 institutions—lack computers, and nearly 35% operate without an internet connection. In response to these vast funding deficits, rural communities have increasingly stepped in. In Pali district, the 'Aao Gaon Chalen' campaign sought to mobilise approximately ₹300 crore in private and diaspora donations to salvage basic village schooling.

​Community philanthropy, however, cannot substitute for state accountability. The crisis of Rajasthan’s public education system is fundamentally one of chronic misallocation and deferred maintenance. While consolidation and school closures attempt to adjust for falling rolls, they fail to resolve the core structural challenge: ensuring that every child who walks through a government school gate enters a safe, fully staffed, and dignified space to learn. In the shadow of the Piplodi tragedy, that baseline remains an urgent imperative.

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*Retired professor, National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad