"Reforming policies is not a sign of failure; refusing to reform them despite changing realities is."

As things stand today, J&K has around 24,000 schools in total — the official count from the government's UDISE system (2023-24 data) puts it at 24,241 schools propagating education to 2.6M students ( 8966 primary schools, 7228 middleschools, 1741 high schools and 788 higher secondary schools. Out of these, about 18,724 are government-run, and the remaining 5,517 are private schools .
That number used to be higher — J&K had over 28,800 schools on record not too long ago. The drop happened because the government went through and merged a lot of small schools that had almost no students. Many government primary schools had shrunk to just a handful of kids, or sometimes none at all, so the education department cleaned up the records and combined them with nearby functioning schools rather than keeping "ghost schools" on the books.
It all started back in 2015-16, when then Education Minister, Mr Nayeem Akhtar, kicked off a state-wide rationalisation scheme — basically a plan to merge schools that weren't functioning well on their own. By the end of that year, close to 3,800 schools had already been clubbed together under this drive.
Fast forward a decade, and the pace has clearly picked up. Between late 2025 upto mid-2026, a total of 4,358 schools were shut down,clubbed or merged. Break that down by region and Kashmir Valley carried the bigger share — 3,084 schools — while Jammu region saw 1,274.
And it doesn't stop there. Sources say another 3,192 schools are now on the chopping block, at risk of being closed or merged because they either have zero students enrolled or fewer than 10. Once again, Kashmir division is ahead on this count with 1,698 schools, while Jammu region has 1,494.
So put together, this has been a slow-building, decade-long process — starting as a modest rationalisation effort in 2015 and turning into a much larger wave of closures and mergers, with Kashmir Valley consistently seeing more schools affected than Jammu.
The closure or clubbing of 4,358 schools doesn't just mean numbers on a government file, it means nearly 10,000 teachers have been directly affected. And if we sit with this fact for a moment, a harder truth starts to emerge: once these posts fall vacant through retirement , the department will likely never advertise them again. Quietly, permanently, these positions will disappear from the system.
But the real loss runs deeper than employment figures. What's actually being shut down, perhaps forever, is a space that meant far more to these communities than four walls and a blackboard. A school is where education is propagated, where society is gradually transformed, where a legacy of learning gets passed from one generation to the next. For countless families, it was often the last real avenue of employment in reach, and something close to a sacred ground , the very place where a doctor, an engineer, a scientist was first imagined into being.
More than anything, a school is a transition point — the place where a society learns, almost effortlessly, how to carry responsibility and reason. When that point disappears from a village or a locality, it doesn't just close a building. It closes a pathway that an entire community once walked through to become something more.
With these schools closed or merged, close to 800 government-owned buildings now stand completely empty. And empty buildings, left unattended, rarely stay just empty for long ,many have reportedly turned into hubs for unlawful activity: drug use, smoking, people just loitering away time, drinking, and other social evils creeping into spaces that once echoed with children's voices.
To be fair, the government hasn't ignored this. There's an official process underway to hand these buildings over to panchayats, so the structures can be put to some meaningful use for the community instead of decaying into liabilities. But here's the frustrating part — the handover process is moving painfully slowly, leaving these buildings stuck in limbo: no longer schools, not yet anything else, and vulnerable in the meantime.
The Government introduced the policy of clubbing (rationalization) of schools with the objective of ensuring optimum utilization of available educational resources and improving the overall quality of education. But it has been observed that objectives of the school clubbing policy have been only partly achieved. Administratively, the policy succeeded in rationalizing teacher deployment and reducing the number of schools from 23,173 to 18,723, thereby optimizing resources and correcting institutional records. However, its core objective of improving educational quality remains largely unfulfilled. Despite the exercise, 16,179 schools still have fewer than 50 students, 848 schools reported zero fresh enrolment, and about 18% of schools continue to have adverse Pupil–Teacher Ratios(Central Ministry of Education MoE April 2024) Although government schools account for nearly 77% of all schools, they enroll only about 54% of students, indicating that parents continue to prefer private institutions.
While board examination results have improved in recent years, these gains are largely attributed to better academic monitoring and teacher accountability rather than the clubbing policy itself. Overall, the policy achieved administrative efficiency but has not significantly improved enrolment or the quality of education.
Nevertheless the core question remains unanswered. What were the reasons or what are the reasons that the government is not in position to explore other options ratherthan sticked on clubbing policy . The clubbing of schools was not merely a response to declining enrolment, it was the outcome of decades of systemic administrative, policy, and governance failures. Instead of addressing the root causes, the Government opted for rationalization as a corrective measure. One of the foremost administrative failures was the absence of a dynamic teacher deployment and transfer policy.Teachers appointed under the Rehbar-e-Taleem (ReT) scheme have, for years, remained outside the ambit of the transfer policy despite being regular Government teachers in terms of designation, pay, grade, duties, and service conditions. As a result, they have remained tied to their original schools, leading to glaring disparities in teacher distribution. While some schools became overstaffed, many others continued to struggle with acute teacher shortages, adversely affecting the quality of education.
If the objectives of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the ReT Scheme have not been fully realized, it is imperative to examine whether their implementation has remained faithful to the spirit of the policies and guidelines. A policy that no longer serves its intended purpose must be reviewed rather than defended in perpetuity.
If the school-specific nature of ReT appointments has become an impediment to equitable teacher deployment and quality education, should we continue to preserve it at the cost of our children's future? Should we remain mute spectators while the public education system weakens and parents, including the poorest, are increasingly compelled to shift their children to private schools?
Policies are created by human beings to serve society—not the other way around. If a policy, however well-intentioned, has outlived its utility or is contributing to systemic imbalance, it should be reformed. If the school-specific condition of the ReT Scheme has become a barrier to educational equity and efficient resource utilization, then it deserves a thoughtful review and, if necessary, amendment. Reforming such a policy is not a departure from its objectives; it is an effort to fulfil them. For the sake of our children, for the sake of quality education, for the sake of free and equitable public education, and for the future of Government schools, policies must evolve with changing realities. No policy should become so rigid that it prevents the education system from responding to the needs of the time. By this our department of education is divided visibly in cadre system which had opened doors for different association and unions that ultimately weakens the government education sector.
Simultaneously, schools continued to be established under various political and social pressures without any long-term demographic or educational planning. The department also failed to periodically review the viability of institutions in light of changing population patterns, declining birth rates, rural-to-urban migration, and the growing preference for private schools. As enrolment steadily declined, neither infrastructure was upgraded nor public confidence in government schools restored. Instead of investing in quality improvement, the system continued to sustain thousands of underutilized schools, placing an increasing financial burden on the exchequer. Faced with these cumulative failures, the Government ultimately resorted to school clubbing as an administrative solution to optimize resources and reduce expenditure. In essence, clubbing addressed the symptoms of the crisis but not its underlying causes.
One of the most significant concern is that I thought may be right or wrong about the school clubbing policy is the apparent absence of a publicly available, comprehensive impact assessment before and after its implementation. A reform affecting thousands of schools, teachers, students, and communities should ideally be preceded by a detailed study evaluating enrolment trends, travel distance for children, infrastructure readiness, teacher availability, learning outcomes, and the socio-economic implications for rural families. Similarly, a post-implementation assessment should measure whether the policy actually improved enrolment, teacher utilization, educational quality, and cost efficiency. Without such evidence-based evaluation in the public domain, it is difficult to determine whether the policy achieved its intended objectives or merely reduced the number of schools on paper. Any major educational reform should be guided by measurable outcomes rather than administrative assumptions. But it is good that government is seriously looking forward for de-clubbing of schools,The Chief Education Officer (CEO) of Srinagar specifically sought to de-club the GHS Barzulla school (previously merged with BHS Hyderpora) and restore its UDISE code to resume physical classes in the locality.
Another question that persistently troubles me is, Who has truly benefited the most from the school clubbing policy ? The primary and most tangible beneficiary has been the Government itself. Through the exercise of clubbing, the administration achieved optimized deployment of teaching staff, curtailment of duplicate infrastructure, streamlined administrative oversight, and material reduction in expenditure on maintaining institutions that were, in practical terms, underutilized. The policy further served an internal compliance function, rationalizing inflated UDISE records and aligning the Union Territory's official school count with ground reality. In administrative and fiscal terms, then, the exercise met its objectives cleanly. The State, in effect, was its own first beneficiary.
The expected beneficiaries were students, who were supposed to gain access to better-equipped schools, improved teacher availability, and enhanced learning opportunities. However, the extent to which these benefits materialized remains debatable, particularly in rural and remote areas where increased travel distance and inadequate transport created new challenges and in the rural and remote belts of the Union Territory, the evidence leans toward unfulfilled promise. For a child in a far-flung habitation, the closure of a nearby school did not translate into a better classroom elsewhere; it translated into a longer walk, an unreliable bus, or in some cases, quiet withdrawal from schooling altogether. A policy justified in the name of the child cannot be called successful if the child bears its heaviest cost.
Perhaps the most unintended consequence of the school clubbing policy has been its indirect benefit to the private education sector in Kashmir. In many areas, the merger of nearby government schools made access more difficult and less convenient for families. Where parents did not see a corresponding improvement in the quality of education, many chose to shift their children to private schools despite the additional financial burden. This was not the intention of the policy, but rather an unintended consequence of its implementation. Better planning—such as providing reliable transport, ensuring nearby alternative schools, strengthening infrastructure, and consulting local communities before clubbing schools—could have reduced this shift and helped retain public confidence in government schools.
At the end, the consequences of this policy go far beyond the education sector. When people begin to lose faith in government schools, they naturally look for alternatives. Many parents, even those with limited incomes, are forced to send their children to private schools, putting an additional financial burden on their families. As more students leave government schools, enrolment continues to decline, leading to further rationalization and closures. This creates a vicious cycle in which public schools become weaker while private schools continue to grow stronger.
The greatest loss, however, is to society. Government schools have always been a symbol of equal opportunity, where children from different social and economic backgrounds learn together. If these schools continue to weaken, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen, and quality education may increasingly become a privilege rather than a right. A strong nation cannot be built on a weak public education system. Strengthening government schools is not merely an educational necessity, it is a social responsibility and an investment in the future of our children.
Policies should be judged not by how many schools they close, but by how many futures they open. The ultimate goal must not be to rationalize schools, but to revitalize public education for every child, irrespective of where he or she lives, who will teach him/ her or what the family can afford.

Email:------------------------rayeesulislam7@gmail.com