Jammu and Kashmir’s education story has acquired a troubling new headline. Official data placed before Parliament shows that the Union Territory has lost 4,386 government schools in five years, with the number falling from 23,173 in 2021–22 to 18,787 in 2025–26. Even if the language of “merger” and “consolidation” is used to soften the blow, the reality remains stark: thousands of public schools have disappeared from the map, and with them the promise of easy, neighbourhood access to education for countless children. The Centre is right in saying that education falls under the Concurrent List and that school opening, merger or closure is a matter for the UT administration. But that constitutional fact cannot become a convenient shelter for administrative complacency. If school consolidation is being done under NEP 2020, it must be judged by one simple test: has it improved learning without making children travel farther, drop out earlier, or lose the familiarity and safety of a nearby school? If the answer is no, then policy has failed its most basic duty. A government school is not merely a building with a bell. In a place like Jammu and Kashmir, it is often the only affordable educational lifeline for poor families, girls, children in remote hamlets, migrant households, and those who cannot absorb the cost of transport or private tuition. When a school closes, the burden does not vanish; it shifts to the child. Longer walks, unsafe routes, transport costs, irregular attendance, and eventually dropout often follow. The loss is therefore not administrative alone, but social, economic and deeply human. The official reply also notes that the number of government schools across the country has declined. But national decline cannot be used to normalise local distress. Jammu and Kashmir has its own geography, its own patterns of habitation, and its own vulnerabilities. What may pass as “rationalisation” in one region can become exclusion in another. In mountainous, scattered and weather-sensitive areas, proximity is not a luxury; it is the condition that makes education possible. The government says the NEP allows consolidation only when done judiciously and without compromising access to neighbourhood schools. That phrase must now be tested against facts on the ground. Were parents consulted? Were distances mapped? Was transport arranged where needed? Were students tracked after mergers? Were schools with low enrolment closed because of genuine demographic shifts, or because years of neglect hollowed them out until closure became inevitable? These are not minor questions. They go to the heart of accountability.
What makes the situation even more worrying is the contrast between rhetoric and reality. The Centre speaks of financial assistance under Samagra Shiksha, classroom construction, transport facilities, free textbooks and uniforms. Yet if the school network itself is shrinking so sharply, then infrastructure support alone is not enough. A classroom is useful only if a child can reach it without hardship. J&K needs an honest audit of these closures, a district-wise public explanation, and a clear plan to restore access where it has been weakened. The measure of education policy is not how elegantly it sounds in official documents, but how faithfully it serves the child at the last village, the farthest slope and the poorest home. On that measure, this decline demands not defence, but correction.
