Special Correspondent: Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir has lost 5,089 government schools over the past decade, while 146 government schools had zero students enrolled and 1,371 were functioning with only a single teacher in 2024-25, official data shows.

Official figures reveal that the number of government schools in IIOJK fell from 23,874 in 2014-15 to 18,785 in 2023-24, a reduction of more than 21 per cent.

The sharpest decline was recorded after 2018-19. India’s own National Institution for Transforming 2024-25 report said the decline reflects school rationalization and merger of under-enrolled institutions to optimize resources. However, the report flagged that 146 schools in IIOJK had no students but still had 61 teachers posted, while 1,371 single-teacher schools were catering to 32,303 students.

The findings come amid IIOJK’s poor performance in PARAKH 2024, where the territory scored 46 per cent in Language, 39 per cent in Mathematics and 41 per cent in ‘The World Around Us’, all below the average. The report raises questions on whether school rationalization, teacher deployment and student distribution are aligned, and whether minimum-distance norms were maintained before merging schools in remote areas.