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Despite record public education spending exceeding ₹1.2 lakh crore in the Union Budget 2025-26, India's dependence on private tuition continues to surge, with NSSO data showing nearly 70% of urban students attending paid coaching — a systemic failure rooted in classroom quality, not classroom quantity, that no budget line has yet addressed.
Here is a number that should stop every education minister mid-speech: India now spends more public money on education than the entire GDP of Sri Lanka. The Union Budget 2025-26, according to government filings tabled in Parliament, allocated ₹1.28 lakh crore to the education sector — the highest nominal figure in the republic's history. New schools have been built. Digital tablets have been distributed. Midday meals reach over 12 crore children daily, per the Ministry of Education's own dashboard.
And yet, on any Tuesday evening in any Indian city — tonight, in fact — millions of children will not be at home. They will be sitting in a tuition centre, often in a cramped room above a pharmacy or behind a tailor's shop, paying a private tutor to teach them what their government-funded school was supposed to teach them that morning.
The paradox is not new. But its scale in 2026 has become impossible to ignore.
The Numbers That Embarrass the Budget
The National Sample Survey Office's most recent consumption expenditure data, analysed by multiple economists and reported by The Hindu, reveals that Indian households now spend an estimated ₹5 lakh crore annually on private education — tuition fees, coaching centre subscriptions, online course payments, and the quiet cash slipped to the neighbourhood tutor every month. That is roughly four times what the government itself spends. In urban India, NSSO figures indicate nearly 70% of students between Class 6 and Class 12 attend some form of paid private tuition. In states like West Bengal, the figure is even higher — over 80%, according to ASER Centre analysis.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, published by the Pratham Foundation and widely cited by Indian Express, delivered the finding that still reverberates through policy circles: roughly half of India's Class 5 students cannot read a Class 2-level text fluently. The learning deficit that the pandemic deepened has not recovered — it has, in ASER's framing, become the new normal.
So the government builds the school. The family pays the tutor. And the child sits through both, exhausted, learning in neither.
Where the Money Goes — and Where It Doesn't
The architecture of India's education spending explains the leak. According to budget documents and analysis published by PRS Legislative Research, the bulk of central education expenditure flows into three channels: Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (the umbrella school-improvement scheme), higher education grants to institutions, and flagship programmes like PM SHRI Schools. These are input-driven allocations — they fund infrastructure, teacher salaries, textbooks, and technology.
What they do not fund, in any meaningful, accountable way, is learning itself.
India Herald's read of the structural failure is this: the Indian education bureaucracy has perfected the art of measuring everything except the thing that matters. It can tell you how many classrooms have smart boards. It cannot tell you — and critically, is not required to tell you — how many children in those classrooms understood today's lesson. The system counts seats, not comprehension. It funds the pipe, then never checks whether water flows through it.
This is not an accident. It is an incentive design. When a state's education performance is judged by enrolment rates, dropout prevention, and infrastructure coverage — all of which are measurable, photographable, and politically claimable — no bureaucrat has a reason to risk measuring the harder thing. Learning outcomes are messy. They expose teacher quality. They implicate training colleges, transfer policies, and political patronage in postings. Measuring them honestly would require courage that no annual budget allocation can purchase.
IHGTalk
The whisper in education policy corridors, according to sources who track NEP 2020 implementation, is that even the National Education Policy's much-celebrated shift toward competency-based assessment is quietly stalling at the state level. The talk among education researchers, as reported in Scroll.in interviews with NCERT consultants, is that state education departments have adopted the NEP's language without adopting its logic — renaming existing exams as "competency assessments" without changing what they test. One former NCERT advisor was quoted describing it as "putting a new label on the same bottle."
Meanwhile, the coaching industry has no such identity crisis. It knows exactly what it sells: exam results. Byju's may have imploded, but the void was filled overnight by hundreds of regional coaching brands and a booming offline tutor economy. Allen Career Institute and Aakash Institute, now backed by corporate capital, reported record enrolments for 2025-26, according to filings reviewed by Mint. The message from families is brutally clear: we do not trust the school to get our child through the exam. We will pay someone who can.
(This section reflects policy-circle chatter and reported speculation, not confirmed government positions.)
The Teacher in the Room — or Not
No discussion of India's tuition dependency is honest without confronting the teacher vacancy crisis. According to data compiled by the Ministry of Education and reported by NDTV, over 10 lakh teaching positions remain vacant in government schools across India as of early 2025. In states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, vacancy rates in some districts exceed 40%. A child cannot learn from a teacher who does not exist.
But even where teachers are present, the training pipeline is broken. The Justice Verma Commission report — now over a decade old but still cited by education researchers as the definitive diagnosis — found that over 80% of India's teacher education institutions were "dysfunctional." NEP 2020 promised a four-year integrated B.Ed. by 2030 to fix this. The 2030 deadline is four years away, and the new programme remains in pilot stage at a handful of institutions, according to Times of India reporting.
The human cost sits in every classroom: a teacher hired through a broken pipeline, given no ongoing professional development, measured only by whether students pass — not whether they learn — and facing a room of 50 children at different learning levels with a single textbook as the only tool. The miracle is not that families turn to private tutors. The miracle is that some teachers, against every systemic incentive, still manage to teach.
What Comes Next — The Corner India Herald Sees Around
If the present trajectory holds — and nothing in the current policy landscape suggests a disruption — India Herald's assessment is that the next three years will see private tuition spending overtake public education spending by a factor of five. The coaching economy, far from being a symptom, will become the de facto education system for the Indian middle class. Government schools will serve two functions: a meal programme and an attendance register that qualifies families for welfare schemes. The classroom itself — the hour of instruction, the moment of understanding — will have been fully outsourced to the market.
The deeper question this forces is not about money. India has the money. The ₹1.28 lakh crore proves it. The question is about courage: does any government — central or state — have the political nerve to measure learning outcomes honestly, publish them school by school, and hold the system accountable for what children actually know? Because until that measurement exists, every rupee spent is a rupee spent on faith — faith that a building with desks and a teacher on payroll automatically produces education.
Every Indian parent paying a tutor tonight knows, in their bones, that it does not.
Reported and written with AI assistance under India Herald's editorial standards; a human editor governs publication.
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Key Takeaways
- India's Union Budget 2025-26 allocated a record ₹1.28 lakh crore to education, yet Indian families spend an estimated ₹5 lakh crore annually on private tuition — roughly four times the government's own outlay.
- ASER 2024 data shows approximately half of India's Class 5 students still cannot read a Class 2-level text, indicating that the pandemic learning deficit has become structural.
- Over 10 lakh government school teaching positions remain vacant nationwide, with vacancy rates exceeding 40% in some districts of UP and Bihar, per Ministry of Education data.
- NEP 2020's promised competency-based assessment overhaul is reportedly stalling at the state level, with existing exams simply relabelled rather than redesigned.
- The core failure is incentive design: education spending is measured by inputs (buildings, tablets, enrolment) rather than outputs (whether a child learned something), creating a gap private tutors profitably fill.
By the Numbers
- ₹1.28 lakh crore: India's Union Budget 2025-26 education allocation, the highest ever (Government of India budget documents)
- ₹5 lakh crore: Estimated annual household spending on private education in India (NSSO consumption expenditure data, analysed by economists)
- ~70%: Share of urban Indian students (Class 6-12) attending paid private tuition (NSSO data)
- 10 lakh+: Vacant government school teaching positions across India as of early 2025 (Ministry of Education data, reported by NDTV)
- ~50%: Share of Class 5 students unable to read a Class 2-level text (ASER 2024, Pratham Foundation)
The 5W+H: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How
- Who: India's central and state education ministries, over 26 crore enrolled students, and a private tuition industry estimated at over ₹5 lakh crore annually.
- What: Record government education spending has failed to curb — and may have accelerated — India's dependence on private coaching and tuition centres.
- When: Union Budget 2025-26 allocated ₹1.28 lakh crore to education; NSSO and ASER surveys from 2024-25 document the continuing learning deficit.
- Where: Across India, most acutely in urban centres where tuition penetration exceeds 70%, and in states like West Bengal, Kerala, and Bihar where tuition culture is deeply entrenched.
- Why: Government spending prioritises enrolment infrastructure, teacher salaries, and scheme headcount over classroom learning outcomes — creating a gap that private tutors fill at family expense.
- How: Schools receive funds for buildings, midday meals, and digital tablets, but teacher vacancies persist, learning-outcome accountability remains absent, and the examination system rewards rote preparation that coaching centres are purpose-built to deliver.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does India spend on public education in 2025-26?
The Union Budget 2025-26 allocated ₹1.28 lakh crore to the education sector, the highest nominal allocation in India's history, according to government budget documents tabled in Parliament.
What percentage of Indian students attend private tuition?
According to NSSO data, approximately 70% of urban Indian students between Class 6 and Class 12 attend some form of paid private tuition. In states like West Bengal, the figure exceeds 80%, per ASER Centre analysis.
Why do Indian students need tuition despite government school spending?
Government education spending focuses on inputs — infrastructure, teacher salaries, midday meals, and devices — rather than measuring and ensuring learning outcomes. Teacher vacancies exceeding 10 lakh positions, broken teacher-training pipelines, and an examination system that rewards rote preparation create a gap that coaching centres are purpose-built to fill.
What does ASER 2024 say about Indian student learning levels?
The ASER 2024 report by Pratham Foundation found that roughly half of India's Class 5 students cannot read a Class 2-level text fluently, indicating that learning deficits deepened by the pandemic have become structural rather than temporary.
Is NEP 2020 fixing India's education quality problem?
Education researchers and NCERT consultants have reported that NEP 2020's competency-based assessment reforms are stalling at the state level, with many states reportedly renaming existing exams without changing what they test, according to interviews published by Scroll.in.
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