Out of school - Out of mind

This is a blind spot in policy and we would argue in our collective conscience.

That schooling should be a given Common Good is not quite a ‘given’ for many families in our country. Access is a problem and further retention is a problem where access exists. Either way it leads to school failure and the child not thriving.

Let’s start at the very beginning.

The problem begins in estimating the quantum of this problem. How many out of school children (OOSC) are really there? There is no consensus on this and figures differ based on survey methods and agendas. Here’s the confusion.

Four counts of out-of-school children and what each measures

Figure	What it measures	Ages	Source
~46 million (about 17%)	Estimate: child population vs children on school rolls (UDISE+ 2024-25)	6–17	Prof. Arun C. Mehta, June 2026
3.22 crore (32.2 million)	NSSO 75th-round household survey, 2017-18	6–17	National Education Policy 2020
11,70,404 (11.7 lakh)	Children identified by states and UTs on the PRABANDH portal, April–November 2024	6–13 (as cited by Mehta, 2026)	Lok Sabha written reply, December 2024
15,338 (Karnataka)	Door-to-door survey: rural areas October 2021; Bengaluru city (BBMP) and urban areas March 2022	6–14	Status report to the Karnataka High Court, July 2022

Sources: Mehta (2026); NEP 2020, para 3.1 (p.10); Economic Times/PTI (2024); Careers360/PTI (2022).

The gap is mostly in the method. An estimate compares the child population with school rolls, so it includes children nobody has visited or a student who might have dropped out of school – yet is counted. Hence typically underestimates drop outs. A door to door survey, on the other hand also counts children who are not in school.

The ASER 2024 household survey of rural India found that 7.9% of rural 15–16-year-olds were not enrolled, about the same as in 2022 (7.5%) and down from 13.1% in 2018. Mehta argues that a new, disaggregated national household survey of out-of-school children is overdue.

A cliff not a slope

Drop out rates steeply go up with stage of schooling – reaching a high of 18% for high school students.

Retention rates for secondary students, in Karnataka is quite worrisome. 97.6% of Karnataka's Class 8 pupils move into Class 9 (India: 88.3%), but only 61.5% move from Class 10 into Class 11 (India: 78.1%), and just 53.0% of boys do. The 18.1% secondary rate barely improved on 18.3% in 2024-25 (vs India rate of 9.5%).

So what drives this problem?

The main reasons for school dropouts in India are child labour and child marriage, which Prof. Mehta's 2026 analysis names as the two main pull factors, along with migration, a new language of instruction, caring for younger siblings and missing documents. Exclusion is concentrated among migrant, urban-poor, disabled, tribal and seasonal-migrant children.

Gubbachi’s experience of 10 years has not been any different.

We designed our programs keeping in mind the barriers that need to be mitigated.

Our bridge programs try and close learning gaps in older children; our Early Childhood program that aligns with every bridge program offers a solution to the problem of sibling care and above all by creating positive, anxiety free classrooms we increase the chances of the migrant child staying and learning in school.

We believe that until policy and politics acknowledge the complexity of this problem and work towards resourcing meaningful solutions – the problem will only grow in scale with growing urbanization and increased migrations.

Till then interventions like ours will need to plug gaps and salvage children in dire need.