You’ve probably seen it by now — people walking into government schools with a camera, asking teachers why the toilets don’t work, why the walls are broken, why things haven’t changed. And honestly? Asking for better schools is a good thing. India needs this conversation.

But before going further, here’s the scale of what we’re actually talking about.

The scale

India runs over 14 lakh schools in total. Of these, over 10 lakh — 10,05,245, to be exact — are government schools, according to the Ministry of Education’s own UDISE+ 2025–26 data. Those government schools alone are staffed by roughly 51 lakh teachers, based on the finding that government schools employ 50.9% of India’s more than 1 crore total teachers.

That’s the system at the center of this conversation.

The problems being pointed out are real

Broken infrastructure, missing basics — genuine gaps still exist across a system running over 10 lakh schools. Running something at this scale is hard, and there’s real work still to do. That part of the conversation is fair, and it’s worth saying plainly: wanting better schools is right. Asking the hard questions, pushing for better infrastructure, better resources, better systems — that work matters, and it shouldn’t stop.

What the cameras don’t show

Here’s what I don’t see enough of in this conversation: the person standing behind that broken door, doing their best with almost nothing.

Teachers don’t just teach. Many schools across the country — most of them government schools — run with just a single teacher. As of UDISE+ 2025–26, that’s 1,00,843 schools nationwide operating on a single teacher’s shoulders.

And it’s not even just teaching. These same teachers also take on responsibilities the country genuinely needs — election duty, census work, Aadhaar enrollment drives, community surveys. Important work. But it adds to everything already asked of them. India’s Right to Education Act technically restricts non-academic work assigned to teachers to elections, the decennial census, and disaster relief — but in practice, the range of civic and administrative tasks teachers take on has grown well beyond that, from voter list verification to government scheme surveys to mid-day meal monitoring.

What hundreds of school visits taught me

I’ve visited hundreds of government schools myself — in Rajasthan, in Bihar, in UP. And what stayed with me wasn’t the broken benches. It was the teacher who’d travelled two hours to get there. The one running a class of four grades at once. The one who was also, somehow, the person the whole village turned to for getting a child’s Aadhar card made.

I walked away inspired more often than I walked away disappointed.

The point

So yes — wanting better schools is right. Ask the hard questions. Push for better infrastructure, better resources, better systems. That conversation matters, and it shouldn’t stop.

But somewhere in that demand, let’s not lose sight of the people already giving everything they have to make it work anyway. Most of these teachers aren’t the problem. They’re doing their best with whatever they’ve been given.

And that deserves a little bit of our empathy too.

References

Kashmir Reader. (2026, May 4). Election duty, Aadhaar verification, census work: Govt school teachers are losing classroom time. https://kashmirreader.com/2026/05/05/election-duty-aadhaar-verification-census-work-govt-school-teachers-are-losing-classroom-time/

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2025, August 28). UDISE+ 2024–25: School education report.

Press Information Bureau, Government of India. (2025, August 28). Ministry of Education releases report on Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2024–25 on school education of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2161543&reg=3&lang=2

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2026, July 7). Report on Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2025–26 on school education in India.

Right to Education Act, 2009, (India). Restrictions on deployment of teachers for non-educational purposes.

The Federal. (2025, October 1). Students schemes, tree plantation and blood donation to census, poll duty — what’s keeping teachers busy. https://thefederal.com/category/the-eighth-column/govt-govt-aid-public-schools-teachers-non-academic-work-burden-elections-census-209448