4,133 Empty Schools: Bengal’s Education Crisis Exposed

The school education system in West Bengal has revealed a striking imbalance, with 4,133 schools reporting zero student enrolment despite having 19,502 teachers, while another 6,769 schools have only one teacher serving a combined 2,29,569 students, according to the Union government’s UDISE+ 2025-26 report. The statistics,  published in July and uploaded to the Union Education Ministry’s website in August has put Bengal at the centre of a debate over teacher deployment, enrolment data and the functioning of its schools.

The scale becomes clearer when comparisons are evaluated nationally. India recorded 5,663 zero-enrolment schools in 2025-26, of which 4,133 which is nearly 73% were in West Bengal. Uttar Pradesh followed with 313 such schools and 177 teachers. Bengal’s number also increased from 3,812 zero-enrolment schools in 2024-25 to 4,133, a rise of 321 in one year. Across the country, however, zero-enrolment schools fell from 7,993 to 5,663 during the same period.

The figures, however, need context. The UDISE+ database is based on information uploaded by schools, and the state government has disputed the implication that all these schools literally have no children attending them. School Education Minister Dipak Barman said some private schools had updated teacher details but failed to update student enrolment information on the portal, causing certain schools to appear as having zero students. The government has said it is working to correct such discrepancies.

At the other end of the spectrum is an equally serious problem: 6,769 single-teacher schools with 2,29,569 students. This amounts to an average of roughly 34 students per single-teacher school, although the actual distribution varies considerably. The figure therefore should not be interpreted as one teacher personally handling 2.29 lakh students; rather, it highlights how many schools are operating with only one teacher despite having enrolled children.

The imbalance is also visible in the wider distribution of students. West Bengal has 93,147 schools, with around 8% reporting 10 or fewer students, while about 8.5% have more than 500 students. The state’s overall pupil-teacher ratio is around 30 students per teacher, compared with 36:1 in neighbouring Jharkhand. Yet an overall ratio can conceal major differences between individual schools, precisely the problem highlighted by the zero-enrolment and single-teacher figures.

The state has already begun responding to the deployment problem. In July, West Bengal introduced a standard operating procedure for teacher rationalisation, under which teachers and non-teaching staff from zero-enrolment schools and schools with surplus personnel can be moved to institutions facing shortages. The stated objective is to match staff deployment with pupil-teacher requirements, effectively.

Barman has also attributed the wider teacher shortage to the disruption caused by recruitment irregularities over the past 15 years and said the government expects the problem to improve by the end of this year. The department has begun transferring teachers from schools with surplus staff to those facing shortages.

The latest UDISE+ figures also have to be viewed against an earlier warning from the Comptroller and Auditor General. Its audit of the implementation of Samagra Shiksha in West Bengal for 2019-20 to 2023-24 had found 520 schools with 8,596 students but no teachers, while another 5,152 schools had more than 1.76 lakh students but only one teacher each. The audit had also identified shortages at the primary and upper-primary levels and raised concerns about student retention and dropout.

There is therefore a crucial distinction between a data problem and a structural problem. Some of the 4,133 zero-enrolment figures may indeed be explained by incomplete or incorrect data uploads, as the state government says. But the existence of thousands of single-teacher schools, along with the earlier CAG findings, points to a broader challenge in ensuring that teachers are distributed according to where students actually are.

For Bengal, the immediate task is consequently not simply to explain why thousands of schools appear empty on paper. It is to clean up the data, complete the ongoing teacher rationalisation and ensure that schools with children are not left struggling with inadequate staff while teachers remain posted elsewhere. The numbers may contain errors, but the imbalance they reveal is difficult to ignore.