Entirely Concur With 'School Thik Karo': India's Neglected Priority, Missing Common Sense, Promise Unkept - Completely Unacceptable Village Schools and the Fight to Fix It Now

Begin with an act of solidarity. The Cockroach Janta Party — the young movement that stood at Jantar Mantar for thirty-six days until an Education Minister resigned — has turned its energy toward the most foundational cause in the country. On August 15, 2026, from his own village of Hingoli in Maharashtra, its founder launched the "School Thik Karo" campaign: asking parents to walk into their village school, audit what is missing, and asking every sarpanch to own the fixing of it. This is precisely the right fight, at precisely the right moment, aimed at precisely the right target. It deserves not applause but amplification. Concur with it. Join it. Because the question the campaign asks is the question this article exists to press: why, eighty years after independence, in the age of good money, do the schools of farmers' and labourers' children still lack light, water, working toilets and a second teacher?

Where India actually sits

Strip away the noise of rankings and unicorns, and here is where India's future physically sits: in roughly 10.2 lakh government schools, most of them in villages, educating the overwhelming majority of the nation's 24.7 crore schoolchildren. Two of every three rural children aged six to fourteen study in a government school. Their parents have no alternative — no budget private school within reach, no school van, no backup plan. For fifteen crore-plus children, the village sarkari school is not one option among many. It is the whole deal. When it fails, no statistic captures what is lost; a generation is quietly written off, one village at a time.

The honest inventory: what is missing, almost everywhere

Let the shortcomings be listed plainly, because a movement needs a charge-sheet. These are the most common gaps, by the government's own UDISE+ data, found across village schools in every state:

No electricity in over 94,000 schools. In 2026, roughly one school in sixteen still has no functional power — no fan in the May heat, no light on a cloudy day, no possibility of a computer.

Toilets that exist on paper. Coverage figures near 97% hide the reality every village parent knows: doors broken, water absent, pits full, girls quietly dropping out at puberty because "having a toilet" and having a usable one are different things. Only about a third of schools have toilets accessible to disabled children.

One teacher for everything. India runs 1,04,125 single-teacher schools — nearly 34 lakh children learning every subject, every grade, from one overwhelmed human who also cooks-supervises the mid-day meal, maintains records and gets pulled away for election duty. Nationally, around ten lakh teacher posts lie vacant, worst at the secondary level where maths, science and English specialists matter most.

No computers, no internet. Only about 65% of schools have computers and 63% internet — and barely 58% have machines actually functional for teaching. Roughly five lakh schools sit on the wrong side of the digital divide in the decade India calls digital.

Crumbling classrooms and bare floors. Dilapidated rooms, leaking roofs, missing boundary walls, absent furniture — children in lakhs of schools still sit on floors. Science labs in secondary schools, kitchen sheds, libraries with actual books, playgrounds with actual equipment: patchy everywhere, absent in the poorest districts.

Teachers present but not teaching. The honest research finding is not mass truancy — unauthorised absence is small — but that on any given day, a large share of teacher time is consumed by non-teaching duties: elections, surveys, censuses, scheme paperwork. The state treats its teachers as its cheapest clerks.

And the learning results follow. There is genuine recent hope — foundational reading and arithmetic in 2024 recorded their best levels in the survey's history, with government schools driving the recovery — but by Grade 9, maths proficiency collapses to around 37%. The foundation is being repaired; the building above it is hollow.

The cruellest paradox: we know how, we just don't scale it

India cannot plead ignorance. It builds excellent government schools — a curated few. Kendriya Vidyalayas top national assessments. PM SHRI is upgrading about 14,500 model schools at nearly ₹2 crore each — roughly one school in a hundred of the government total. Delhi spent a fifth of its budget on education and made its schools a global story. And Andhra Pradesh's Nadu-Nedu gave complete facelifts — running water, working toilets, furniture, paint, fans, compound walls — to over 45,500 schools for a proposed ₹16,000 crore, executed through parents' committees. The proof of concept exists in every direction.

Which is exactly what indicts the norm. For every school that glitters for the inspection photograph, ninety-nine make do with what the eighty-year-old building can offer. The two-tier system is not an accident; it is a settlement we have accepted — model schools for showing, ordinary schools for the poor. The children can tell the difference. So can their parents.

Why the highest-priority area got the lowest priority

The neglect has structure, and naming it is half the fight.

The elite exited. The official who administers the district's schools, the legislator who votes its budget, the teacher who staffs it — their own children overwhelmingly sit in private classrooms. In 2015 the Allahabad High Court, appalled, ordered that everyone paid from the public exchequer must send their children to government schools. It was never implemented. When the decision-makers have no skin in the game, the game decays.

Schools don't swing votes. A road is visible by election day; a cash transfer arrives before it. A child taught well in 2026 votes in 2040. Long-gestation, invisible returns lose every budget battle against instant, visible ones — so education stays stuck near 2.9% of GDP against the 6% promised since 1966.

Even the allotted money sleeps. States spent barely 62% of their approved Samagra Shiksha budgets last year; audits found one state leaving half its education budget idle while lakhs of children went without uniforms and textbooks arrived a year late. The bottleneck is will and administration, not only allocation.

We measured enrolment, not learning. The Right to Education counted buildings and admissions; nobody was accountable for whether a child could read. What is not measured is never fixed.

The war footing: seven actions, starting now

1. A National School Infrastructure Mission with a three-year clock. Every government school — functional power (solar where the grid fails), safe water, usable toilets, furniture, boundary wall, internet. At Nadu-Nedu's per-school cost, the national bill is in the low tens of thousands of crores — a fraction of what one bullet-train line costs, small change beside annual subsidy bills. The money exists; the deadline doesn't. Set it.

2. Fill the ten lakh teacher vacancies in twenty-four months. Single-teacher schools first; secondary maths, science and English next. And ring-fence teachers legally from every non-teaching duty except brief statutory election work.

3. Scale Nadu-Nedu nationally — through parents. Assured multi-year funds, executed by school management committees, so works never stall and the community owns what it builds.

4. Publish every school's truth. A public dashboard per school — teachers present, toilets working, funds received and spent — plus an annual social audit by parents. Exactly the CJP's model: walk in, verify, name what's missing, demand it.

5. Open adopt-a-school channels. Let CSR money and the diaspora adopt named village schools with outcome-linked public reporting. A crore of NRIs adopting one school each would rewrite the map.

6. End the elite exit. Revive the spirit of the 2015 order: at minimum, every official administering education in a district enrols his or her own children in its government schools. Watch how fast the toilets get fixed.

7. Make the village school an election issue. This is the decisive lever and the movement's real job — converting the invisible, slow returns of education into visible, immediate political cost. No sarpanch, MLA or MP should survive a broken school in his constituency.

The call

Eighty years is long enough. We have proven in Delhi, in Andhra, in every Kendriya Vidyalaya, that the Indian state can run a school worthy of its children. What has been missing is not knowledge or money but a movement that refuses the two-tier settlement — and that movement has now begun, started by the young, from a village in Hingoli. Concur with it. Amplify it. This week, walk into the government school at the end of your village road. Count the teachers. Try the tap. Open the toilet door. Then ask, loudly, on record, why — and do not stop asking until it is fixed. The future of India is sitting on the floor of that school, waiting for the country to show up.