Binish Thomas (Special Correspondent)
The budget arithmetic behind the outrage
India’s combined central-and-state education spending stood at just 2.7% of GDP in 2023-24, according to the Economic Survey — far below the 6% of GDP recommended by the Kothari Commission six decades ago and reaffirmed by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
Even using the higher central-budget-only measure, India allocated 4.6% of GDP to education in FY25, still trailing the US (6%), China (6.13%) and Japan (7.43%).
More striking is the trend line: the Education Ministry’s share of the total Union Budget fell from 4.6% in 2013-14 to just 2.5% in 2025-26 — even as the Union Budget’s road transport and highways allocation nearly tripled over the same period, rising to almost 6% of total spending.
Against that backdrop, the ₹2,989–3,000 crore (roughly $400-450 million) spent building the Statue of Unity the world’s tallest statue has repeatedly been held up by critics as a symbol of misplaced priority, even as officials defend it as a tourism and cultural investment.
The comparison isn’t precise economics statues and school repairs are funded through different heads and by different levels of government but it captures a public mood that has now spilled onto the streets, quite literally.
Schools are closing and, in some cases, collapsing
Government data confirms the scale of closures is Roughly 94,000 government schools shut, merged or were consolidated between 2014-15 and 2024-25, with the government’s own count of institutions falling from 11.07 lakh to 10.13 lakh.
The share of Indian schoolchildren enrolled in government schools has slid from over 70% in 2005 to 49.2% in 2024-25 meaning, for the first time, most Indian schoolchildren are no longer in government schools.
Officials attribute part of this to falling fertility rates and NEP-backed “rationalisation” of low-enrolment schools into larger, better-resourced campuses.
Critics counter that consolidation lengthens commutes for rural and poor children and accelerates the shift toward costlier private schooling.
The infrastructure crisis turned fatal in Rajasthan on 25 July 2025, when part of a classroom roof collapsed in Piplodi village, Jhalawar district, killing seven children and injuring 27; a second roof collapsed the very next day in Nagaur district.
The Rajasthan High Court subsequently ordered 86,934 dilapidated classrooms locked statewide — a repair bill estimated at ₹20,000 crore against an annual state repair budget of only about ₹375 crore.
That tragedy helped trigger a wave of student-led protests. In July–August 2026, children in at least 10 states and 25 districts from Rajasthan and Bihar to Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Jharkhand staged sit-ins and strikes demanding teachers, toilets, drinking water, electricity and safe buildings.
In one widely shared case, girls at government schools in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district held hunger strikes and locked their own school gates over teacher shortages; the state education minister has since acknowledged a shortfall of roughly 13,000 teachers statewide.
NEET: one exam, unequal starting lines:
The state-board and regional-language students struggling with NEET is borne out by data. Tamil Nadu’s 2022 NEET pass rate among government-school applicants was just 35%, compared with the state’s overall pass rate of 51.2% itself below the national average of 56.3%.
Public health researchers have flagged that NEET’s syllabus is built around the CBSE/NCERT framework, disadvantaging state-board students even when they sit the exam in their mother tongue, since coaching material, reference books and mock tests are overwhelmingly in English.
The pull toward English is intensifying: NTA registration data shows Marathi-medium NEET applicants collapsed from 31,239 in 2019 to just 1,144 in 2026, and Odia from 31,490 to 716, as students abandon regional-language papers they feel put them at a disadvantage despite the option being available
An insurance industry built to deny, not disburse
The claims data supports the frustration many families voice.
In FY24, Indian health insurers disallowed or repudiated ₹26,000 crore in claims a 19% jump year-on-year and of ₹1.17 lakh crore in total claims, only 71.29% of the value was actually paid out, per the insurance regulator IRDAI.
About 11% of claims were rejected outright and 6% remained pending as of March 2024. Insurance penetration itself has been falling, dropping to 3.7% of GDP in 2023-24 from 4.2% two years earlier evidence that affordability and trust are both strained.
Hospitals: a quiet ownership shift :
Public hospitals aren’t the only ones under pressure private ones are changing hands fast. Nearly half of India’s leading hospital chains are now owned or controlled by global private equity, following India’s 2015-16 decision to permit 100% foreign direct investment in healthcare with no prior approval needed.
Recent deals include Blackstone-backed entities acquiring Care Hospitals and KIMS, Temasek-backed Manipal buying Sahyadri Hospitals for ₹6,000 crore, and KKR expanding aggressively in Kerala. India still has only about 0.6 hospital beds per 1,000 people, against a recommended 3 meaning capacity is scarce even as ownership consolidates into fewer, profit-driven hands. Research cited by industry analysts has linked private-equity hospital ownership to higher rates of patient complications in some settings, adding urgency to your call for stronger public alternatives.
The public healthcare system your note flags in North India
The gap is starkest in exactly the region you mention. Rural India faces an overall 80% shortfall of specialist doctors at Community Health Centres the 30-bed facilities meant to serve as the backbone of rural secondary care.
State-level shortfalls are especially severe in the north and centre: Bihar (80.9%), Uttar Pradesh (74.4%), Rajasthan (80.3%) and Madhya Pradesh (94%).
Bihar’s own government has admitted a doctor-population ratio of roughly 1 doctor per 22,000 people, with about 8,000 sanctioned doctor posts lying vacant; a CAG audit separately found bed shortfalls of 52–92% in several district hospitals that hadn’t been addressed in over a decade.
What the numbers suggest:
None of this data settles the political argument over whether monuments and school funding are a fair trade-off that’s a judgment call, and officials would point out that tourism infrastructure, highways, and education draw from different budget streams and serve different goals.
But the underlying facts your note raises hold up:
Education spending remains well below India’s own policy targets, tens of thousands of government schools have closed even as some have physically collapsed, entrance exams still disadvantage regional-language and state-board students, insurance claim denials are rising, and rural especially North Indian public healthcare remains critically understaffed even as private hospital ownership consolidates into global investment hands.
