18 February 2026
The Growing Silences in Uttarakhand’s Classrooms, and Why It Matters
For many years, government schools have played a foundational role in imparting education to the mountainous villages of Uttarakhand. One can find a government primary school in almost every hilly village, no matter how remote. Their predominance is also contingent upon the limited presence of private schools in the hilly regions. But in recent years, the vast majority of government schools have been forced to shut down due to persistent out-migration. This has thrown the state education system into a severe crisis. This commentary discusses how the shrinking number of schools and out-migration are interconnected and feed into each other.
The Education Report 2025, published by the Rural Development and Migration Prevention Commission of the Government of Uttarakhand, lays bare the picture of schooling at the primary and secondary levels, especially in rural and hilly districts. It points to the shrinking population of school-age children as a result of widespread school closures and consolidation across the state. Among 12,000 primary government schools, about 1,400 schools have zero enrolment, while thousands more operate with fewer than 10 students. The uneven deployment of teachers further compounds this crisis, as some schools have surplus staff, while others are forced to function with a single teacher responsible for teaching multiple grades as well as handling administrative duties. Such poor alignment of the teacher-student ratio severely undermines the quality of education in the long term and accelerates the pace of shutdown of government schools in rural hilly regions.
The Report attributes this deterioration in educational quality to the state’s intractable out-migration. Uttarakhand has been witnessing persistent out-migration for more than two decades, particularly in the hill districts of Almora and Pauri Garhwal. Both districts have experienced negative population growth over the past two decades, along with a rise in the number of “ghost villages”. It is those who remain in the village that pay the steepest price of out-migration. As the population thins out, the gaze of development intervention also shifts, affecting people’s access to schooling, healthcare, and other essential services. Over time, poorly-staffed schools, irregular classes, and limited learning opportunities push families to seek life elsewhere.
These educational concerns intersect with other drivers of migration such as weak healthcare, unemployment and declining returns from agriculture. Educational decline and migration thus form a vicious loop in which weak schooling drives families away, and migration in turn reduces the number of school-going children. This makes rural schools vulnerable to consolidation and closure.
There have been growing instances of schools functioning with just one teacher or serving a single student – such cases are not anomalies but an emerging pattern across the state. On the face of it, schools operating for one or two students may seem symbolically inspiring or even heroic, but it is essential to recognise that schooling is not confined to classroom instruction alone. Schools also function as social spaces where children learn to interact, form friendships, iron out differences, and, most importantly, develop a sense of belonging and empathy towards others and society at large. Besides, peer learning, teamwork, debate and collective experience are indispensable for the holistic and cognitive development of children, which they learn naturally in schools. Unfortunately, all these dimensions are severely compromised in the isolated classrooms with only a handful of students and teachers. Education itself has now been reduced to a narrow exercise of syllabus completion, to merely serving as a means of imparting knowledge or meeting the benchmarks of basic literacy when its broader purpose ought to be to nurture socially grounded, critically aware individuals.
The growing silences in the classrooms of Uttarakhand must not be ignored. It requires the state to reconsider its approach to both ongoing depopulation and school education. At the very least, a more thoughtful, long-term vision is required to strengthen rural education for those who choose to stay in villages in the face of rising out-migration. It can be accomplished by improving educational facilities and ensuring that teachers are properly positioned to safeguard children’s right to meaningful education. The state needs to envision a school system that nurtures children's holistic development, so that education becomes a reason for families to stay rather than a force that pushes them elsewhere. At the same time, addressing the underlying issues of migration, such as providing livelihoods, improving healthcare access, and expanding jobs both on and off farms, should go hand-in-hand with education reforms. Only through such strong statist intervention can the current vicious cycle of migration be translated into a virtuous one. If timely steps are not taken, migration to the plains will persist not much as a choice, but as an imperative born out of hardship. What is at stake is not just the education system, but the very vitality of society.
About the author: Garima Bhandari is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee.
Share this on: