A government-run primary school for girls in Khedi Kalan village, Faridabad district, on the outskirts of Delhi, looks respectable from outside after a fresh coat of paint, but inside it is crumbling. Local social worker Satpal Narwat points out plaster falling from the ceiling, four of eight toilets unusable and full of trash, and four of nine classrooms abandoned as unsafe for children. During rains, classrooms get flooded and children have no place to sit. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
This is not an isolated case. Many schools, especially in rural India, are starved of funding and in disrepair. India spends only 4.1% of its GDP on education. While this meets UNESCO's lower minimum threshold of 4%, several countries, including France, Germany, Australia, Brazil, and the US, spend more than 5% of GDP on education. Belgium and Sweden spend even more. Experts and India's own National Education Policy (NEP) have recommended 6% as the ideal mark.
According to official data, 94,000 government schools closed between 2014-15 and 2024-25. A report by government think-tank Niti Aayog says some were merged to streamline the system, but acknowledges that enrolment has fallen as demand for private schools has risen.
The poor state of government schools is the focus of a new campaign by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The online satirical movement made global headlines for its weeks-long protest in Delhi, which culminated in the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan last month. Protests erupted in May after NEET, India's biggest medical entrance exam, was cancelled following a question paper leak, forcing nearly two million students to retake the test. More than 20 students died by suicide, with their families blaming the scandal.
Named #SchoolThikKaro (#FixTheSchool), the CJP's latest campaign aims to highlight crumbling infrastructure in government schools and pressure authorities into addressing it. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke told the BBC: "Government schools, especially in rural India, have been neglected for many many decades now. So, children who grow up in villages don't have equal opportunities and they end up working in farms or as a daily wage labourer or construction workers. It's only because they don't get the same facilities and the same opportunities that children in big cities get. And that is what we are trying to change by making schools better."
On Thursday, Dipke said he had visited more than 20 rural schools and had "not found even a single good school". "There were no benches, no bathrooms, no drinking water, no facilities at all. Even animals would not be kept in such a place," he said. "What I saw was really heartbreaking. This is very similar to what I used to see when I used to visit my village during school summer vacation. And even after 20 years, nothing have changed there."
In recent days, Dipke and other CJP leaders have shared several videos - of leaking roofs, dirty toilets, children sitting on the floor, and angry students - with their 26 million Instagram followers. "We want to ensure that children get benches to sit on, good washrooms and clean drinking water. They should have smart classrooms with digital boards. That is when they will also feel that they are getting the same quality of education as those living in big cities in the country," Dipke said.
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi or his Bharatiya Janata Party have not commented on the campaign. The BBC has also contacted India's education ministry for a response.
Meanwhile, the CJP's protest in Delhi and the campaign to fix schools appear to have emboldened students across India and opened floodgates of complaints, setting off localised mutinies against an administration many accuse of being apathetic. Armed with mobile phones, school students have been shooting and posting videos on social media - some of which have gone viral and prompted authorities to act. After one video of schoolgirls in Raigad, Maharashtra, mocking the condition of the road leading to their school went viral, local authorities repaired it. In Uttar Pradesh, another video showed students running into the district magistrate's office demanding a road to their school, while a third showed schoolgirls asking an official whether he would send his own children to a school in such poor condition.
At Delhi's Jantar Mantar, where the CJP held its earlier protest, the group demanded Pradhan's resignation as well as an overhaul of India's education system with greater accountability. Journalist and author Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay says "by the end of their protest, it was clear that it wasn't just about one exam or one minister's resignation".