UDISE+ 2025-26 data shows India's educational expansion has outpaced educational equity. Discuss the structural reasons for persistent regional and social disparities in access to school education.

UDISE+ 2025-26 covers 1.47 million schools, 24.72 crore students and 1.03 crore teachers, reporting falling dropout and improved stage-to-stage transition [1]. Yet these national averages conceal sharp regional and social gaps — expansion in access has clearly outrun equity in access.

Federal and fiscal asymmetry

• Education is a Concurrent subject; delivery depends on each State's capacity to meet its matching share under Samagra Shiksha, so revenue-poor States provision less per child [3].
• Terrain and sparse settlement in hill and north-eastern States sustain small, single-teacher schools, whose numbers fell only marginally in 2025-26 [1] — a favourable national PTR of 10-21, well below NEP 2020's 30:1 norm, therefore hides local teacher shortages [1][4].

Infrastructural and digital divide

• Roughly one in three schools still lacks internet, and computer access remains far from universal [2], weakening NEP 2020's promise of digital equity and leaving remote and rural learners dependent on offline teaching alone [4].

Stage-wise and social barriers

• Dropout is stage-concentrated: 1.8% at preparatory but 7.0% at secondary, with middle-to-secondary transition the weakest at 88.3% [1].
• The RTE Act, 2009 read with Article 21A guarantees free education only for ages 6-14 [5]; secondary schooling lies outside this justiciable claim, so distance, cost and early entry into work push out SC/ST, migrant and adolescent girl learners first.

Data-governance gaps

• Wide State-wise variation in Aadhaar seeding of student records [2] risks exclusion errors in DBT-linked scholarships and entitlements, penalising precisely the tribal and hill districts that need them most.

The disparities are thus structural — rooted in fiscal federalism, geography, the age-limits of the rights framework, and uneven digital and data capacity — not merely administrative lapses. Equity-weighted central transfers, PGI-linked accountability, and extending the RTE guarantee upward to secondary level would align school education with Article 21A's substantive promise and SDG-4.