India Is Adding Private Schools Even as It Runs Out of Children

By Sankar, Chief Operating Officer, Ether

New Delhi [India], July 2: Consider two facts that sit oddly together. In 2024-25, the number of private schools in India rose to 3.79 lakh, up from 3.31 lakh a year earlier. We are building schools at pace. And yet, in the same year, total school enrolment fell to 24.69 crore — the third consecutive annual decline, down from 25.18 crore just two years before.

More schools. Fewer students. If that contradiction doesn’t worry you yet, it should — because it is quietly rewriting the rules of how every school in India will compete for the next decade.

Start with the decline itself. It is real, and it is structural. The fall is concentrated in the primary classes, where the school-age population is thinning as birth rates drop. This isn’t a blip to be waited out; it is a demographic tide, and tides don’t reverse on an academic calendar. The pool of children that every school draws from is shrinking, and will keep shrinking for years.

Now look at where the remaining children are going. Government school enrolment has fallen sharply — from 13.62 crore two years ago to 12.16 crore today. Private enrolment has moved the other way, climbing to 9.59 crore. Private schools now account for 39% of all enrolments, the highest share in years. Parents, in other words, are trading up — choosing to pay for private education even as household budgets tighten, because they believe it buys their child something better.

Government vs private school enrolment, 2022-23 to 2024-25 (crore). Private schools now take 39% of all enrolments — the highest share since 2018-19. Source: UDISE+ 2024-25, Ministry of Education.

Put those two movements together and you have what I’d call the great inversion of Indian schooling. For two decades, private schools rode a growing, urbanising, aspirational population; a new school could open and fill its seats almost by default. That era is over. The population is no longer growing, but private capacity is — which means schools are now competing, harder than ever, for a smaller and more discerning set of families.

This is the part most school leaders haven’t fully absorbed. Growth is no longer the default; it is a prize that has to be won, family by family, often from other schools. And the family you are trying to win is more informed, more cost-conscious, and has more options than ever before.

When demand is finite and competition is rising, the maths of running a school changes in one specific way: the cost of losing a family goes up. Every enquiry that goes cold, every parent who visited and never heard back, every application left half-finished — these were always losses, but in a growth market they were absorbed by the next wave. There is no next wave now. The enquiry you lose this year is not replaced; it is simply lost, often to the school down the road.

Which is why I believe the decisive advantage in the next decade won’t be marketing budgets or glossier campaigns. Those help you generate enquiries. The schools that win will be the ones that lose the fewest of the enquiries they already have. That is a quieter, less glamorous discipline — speed of response, consistent follow-up, knowing which enquiry is serious and which has gone elsewhere, making the parent’s journey from first call to final admission feel effortless.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: in most schools, that work happens in the admission office, which is too often seasonal, understaffed, and run on memory and spreadsheets. The function that now determines whether a school grows or shrinks is frequently the least systematised part of the institution. Treating admissions as a once-a-year scramble made sense when the cohort filled itself. It is a liability now.

I should be candid about my vantage point here: this is the problem we work on. At Ether, we built our admissions platform, Enrol, precisely because the admission office had become the place where schools quietly win or lose families — yet most were still running it on memory and spreadsheets. Automated follow-ups so no enquiry goes cold, AI-assisted parent conversations on WhatsApp, lead prioritisation that surfaces the families most likely to enrol: in a growing market these were conveniences. In a shrinking one, they are the difference between a filled seat and an empty one.

None of this asks schools to treat admissions as marketing. It asks them to treat it as what it has become — a strategic, year-round function, closer to how schools already think about finance or compliance than to a seasonal form-collection exercise. The schools that staff it properly, measure it honestly, and give it the discipline to run well will take share from those that still treat it as a once-a-year scramble.

None of this is cause for panic. Demographics are slow, and slow problems reward those who act early. But the schools that thrive through this inversion will be the ones that stop assuming the seats will fill, and start treating every family as hard to win and easy to lose. The next decade of Indian schooling won’t be won by the schools with the biggest campaigns. It will be won by the ones that lose the fewest children.

Dr. Sankar Krishna is Chief Operating Officer of Ether (EduMeridian School Systems Private Limited), which builds Enrol, an admissions platform used by schools across India. Views expressed are personal.

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