Revisit: School Improvement Campaign and 5 States at the Bottom Requiring Significant Work

On the eve of the school-improvement campaign, one question matters more than any other: where do we begin? A movement with limited hands and unlimited love for children must go where the problem is biggest — and the data answers that question with uncomfortable clarity.

First, a note on method. The Government of India's own Performance Grading Index (PGI 2.0, 2025-26) scores every state out of 1,000 points across learning outcomes, access, infrastructure, equity, governance and teacher training, drawing directly from UDISE+, the PARAKH national survey and other official databases. In the latest edition, not a single state reached the top grades — the best performer, Chandigarh, scored just 703, and the lowest, Meghalaya, 417. By raw score, the worst performers include several small north-eastern states. But this campaign must weigh volume: a struggling school system in a state of 13 crore people damages a hundred times more childhoods than one in a state of 30 lakh. Weighted by the number of children trapped inside failing systems, the bottom five are unmistakable — all sitting in the PGI's lowest "Akanshi" bands, all running enormous school networks: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal. Together they hold roughly four of every ten Indian schoolchildren. Fix these five, and India's averages transform.

Before naming names, one truth must be stated without hedging: every state in India requires vast work in this area, because the country as a whole is lagging. In the latest PGI 2.0, not one state or union territory reached the top three grades — the best performer managed barely 70% of the possible score, and even celebrated systems like Kerala and Delhi fall well short of what their own children deserve. Toppers in a failing class are still in a failing class. Single-teacher schools exist in Andhra Pradesh as much as in Bihar; unspent funds, crumbling toilets and secondary-stage learning gaps show up on every state's dashboard, north or south, rich or poor. So this is not an exercise in shaming a few laggards while the rest applaud from safety — no state has earned the right to applaud. It is an exercise in triage: when the whole body is unwell, treatment begins where the condition is most severe and the patient count is highest. Some states are simply a little worse than the rest, and they hold the most children. That is the only reason the five that follow are named.

1. Bihar — the deepest deficit, the largest classrooms

Bihar is, by nearly every composite measure, the hardest place in India to be a government-school child. It sat at the very bottom of NITI Aayog's SDG quality-education index, and remains in the PGI's lowest bands. Its pupil-teacher ratios are the worst among major states; it has carried the country's largest stock of single-teacher schools — over 17,000 at last full count. Surveys find actual student attendance hovering around 55% — meaning that on a given day, nearly half the enrolled children simply aren't there, a symptom of classrooms that teach little. The India Forum's assessment was blunt: a paucity of resources compounded by ineffective policy, with "hardly any public discussion" about it. The silver lining: Bihar recorded the country's best recent improvement in the access domain — enrolment and retention are rising. Children are coming. The state must now put teachers in front of them: a mission-mode recruitment of subject teachers, rationalised postings to kill the single-teacher school, and learning-outcome dashboards published district by district.

2. Uttar Pradesh — the biggest system, carrying the biggest weight

UP is the largest school system in India — which makes its presence in the PGI's bottom "Akanshi" category a national emergency by arithmetic alone. Independent rankings (the PIE Index) have repeatedly named UP among the worst-performing large states. It still runs about 9,500 single-teacher schools, and its secondary-level teacher ratios are among the most strained in the country. UP's problem is not effort — recent years have seen genuine infrastructure drives (Operation Kayakalp) — but scale outrunning capacity. What UP needs is triage at volume: fill secondary maths-science-English posts first, merge honestly with guaranteed transport rather than quietly closing schools, and put its enormous DIET teacher-training network to work on foundational literacy, where every point of improvement moves crores of children.

3. Jharkhand — where the most marginalised get the least

Jharkhand's numbers are the most morally troubling in India. Its higher-secondary pupil-teacher ratio is 47:1 — the worst in the country, double the national average. It runs over 9,000 single-teacher schools, and field surveys found something the dashboards hide: about 20% of surveyed schools were single-teacher, 40% of primary schools were run entirely by para-teachers (contract staff with less training, who make up 55% of primary teachers), and 90% of children in single-teacher schools were Dalit or Adivasi. Read that again: the state's teacher shortage is not randomly distributed — it lands squarely on the children with the least power to protest. Jharkhand's action list writes itself: regularise and train the para-teacher workforce, direct every new posting to tribal blocks first, and treat the 47:1 secondary ratio as the emergency it is.

4. Madhya Pradesh — going backwards while others inch forward

MP earns its place on this list for a uniquely worrying reason: it is one of the few states whose PGI score declined in the latest cycle. It also leads the country in school closures — nearly 7,000 government schools shut or merged in five years — often without the transport guarantees that make consolidation humane. Attendance surveys place it alongside Bihar at the bottom (~55-56%). A state that is simultaneously shrinking its network, slipping on the index, and losing its children's daily presence is a state whose system is quietly contracting. MP must pair every merger with a bus, publish a school-wise closure-impact audit, and rebuild the governance-process scores it has let slide.

5. West Bengal — capacity crippled by governance

Bengal's tragedy is self-inflicted in a distinctive way. It sits in the Akanshi band with declining scores in access and teacher education — and its deeper wound is governance: the state spent under a quarter of its approved central Samagra Shiksha funds in a recent year, among the worst utilisation in India, and its teacher recruitment machinery was paralysed for a decade by the school-jobs scandal that ended with the Supreme Court cancelling some 25,000 appointments. A generation of classrooms went without legitimately recruited teachers while the money to hire them sat unspent. Bengal's fix is institutional before it is educational: a clean, court-proof, annual recruitment calendar, and spending the funds it already has.

The honest footnote — and the actionable core

Honesty requires two footnotes. Meghalaya scores lowest of all and deserves targeted central support even if its volume is small. And Andhra Pradesh — otherwise a reform leader with Nadu-Nedu — holds the single largest count of one-teacher schools (nearly 13,000), proof that no state gets to relax.

But the campaign's insight is this: India's school crisis is not evenly spread — it is concentrated, mappable, and therefore fixable. Five states, four of ten Indian children, one shared pattern: teachers missing where children are most present, funds unspent where needs are greatest, and the poorest communities absorbing the worst of it. So let the movement march with a targeted list: adopt and audit schools in these five states first; demand each publish a district-wise teacher-vacancy and fund-utilisation dashboard; press Bihar and UP on recruitment, Jharkhand on para-teacher regularisation and tribal-block postings, MP on merger transport, Bengal on clean hiring and spending. National averages are consoling; these five states are where the averages are made. Fix the bottom, and the whole country rises — that is not a slogan, it is arithmetic. On the eve of the campaign, the map is drawn. Now we march to it.