The Schools Nobody Wants?

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a school building when the bell rings, and no one comes running, or the school doesn’t produce various noises during school hours. Anyone who has walked past a government school in Kolkata on a weekday morning knows this silence. The gate is open. The chowkidar is at his post. Somewhere inside, a fan turns lazily over rows of benches that were built for forty children and now seat twelve. This is not a scene from a ghost town. This is Bengal's own capital, a city that once called itself the cultural and intellectual capital of India, a city where the very idea of the modern Indian school was shaped in the nineteenth century by reformers who believed education could remake a society. And yet, according to figures reported by the Economic Times, around 211 government schools across Kolkata recorded zero enrollment in 2025. Not low enrollment. Zero.

Bengal was not supposed to end up here. This is the state that once prided itself on being the intellectual engine room of India, the land of Vidyasagar's reformist zeal, Tagore's Santiniketan experiment, and a public education system that, for much of the twentieth century, produced doctors, scientists, civil servants, and poets in equal measure. Government schools were not the fallback option; they were often the aspiration. A seat in a respected Kolkata government school once meant something.

That inheritance is now being quietly dismantled, one empty classroom at a time. According to a 2025 Economic Times report, as many as 211 government schools in Kolkata recorded zero enrollment that year. Not low enrollment ‘zero’. Buildings standing fully staffed, fully equipped by government standards, and fully empty of the one thing a school actually needs: students. It is a number that should stop a city in its tracks, and yet it has arrived almost as a footnote, one more data point in a slow motion crisis that has been unfolding for over two decades.

To understand how a system with this much history arrived at zero, we have to walk the story backwards through report cards, staffrooms, recruitment scandals, and the quiet arithmetic that middle class and working class Bengali families do every year when they decide where to send their children.

**The Turning Point**

Ask any long serving teacher in a Kolkata government school when things changed and most will point to roughly the same period: the early 2000s, when private schooling stopped being a luxury reserved for the elite and became a promise available to almost anyone willing to stretch their budget. Private schools did something government institutions, bound by their founding purpose of "education for all," were never quite built to do they began selling a dream. Not just literacy but a trajectory. A story where a child walks in wearing a blazer and walks out, years later, with a seat in an IIT, a foreign university or a stable, high status career.

Government schools, meanwhile, kept doing what they had always done: offering access. But access, it turned out, was no longer the thing that anxious parents were shopping for. They wanted an escalator, not just a doorway.

**Two Buildings, Two Worlds**

If we stood outside a well known private institution like a Delhi Public School franchise or St. Xavier's Collegiate School, and then walked ten minutes to the nearest municipal government school, we would essentially be crossing between two different centuries. One has manicured playing fields, air conditioned classrooms, smart boards, swimming pools in some cases and laboratories stocked with equipment that would not look out of place in a small college. The other, more often than not, still has the same blackboard it had thirty years ago, walls that haven't seen fresh paint since before its current students were born, toilets that parents whisper about with visible discomfort and a library whose newest arrivals are older than the librarian's tenure.

It is not merely an aesthetic gap. It is a gap in what a childhood is allowed to include. Private school students grow up with karate lessons, football coaching, coding classes, foreign language electives, NCC and NSS exposure, inter school competitions and educational tours that widen their sense of the world. In government schools, these activities exist mostly on paper attended when convenient, when free or when institutionally unavoidable, rather than treated as central to a child's development.

**The Weight of Being ‘Seen’ or ‘Not’**

Perhaps the most quietly devastating difference, though, has nothing to do with buildings or budgets. It has to do with whether a child feels ‘perceived’.

In many private schools, a student is treated deliberately as an academic investment, but also as a human being with talents worth discovering. Favorable teacher student ratios and assigned mentors mean a teacher can often name a struggling student's specific weakness, or recognize a hidden talent ex– painting or debate and nudge it along. Students describe genuine emotional bonds with certain teachers the kind that outlast the classroom itself.

Contrast this with a government school classroom where the ratio of teacher to student can make individual attention almost mathematically impossible. Some class teachers, by their own admission, cannot reliably put a name to every face in their register. Communication rarely goes beyond academics and discipline, not from indifference alone, but from sheer structural impossibility there simply isn't time or incentive. And where connection fails, resentment sometimes fills the gap: students recalling teachers who humiliated them without cause, who seemed more interested in offering paid private tuition than in teaching in the classroom itself, who treated the job as a secure government post rather than a calling. For many, an entire five year stretch of schooling can pass without a single meaningful conversation with a teacher who saw them as more than a roll number.

**A Wound That Doesn't Heal Quickly**

Layered onto all of this is something harder to fix than infrastructure or staffing ratios: trust. West Bengal's School Service Commission recruitment scandal and the CBI investigations that followed saw teachers dismissed and the credibility of the state's recruitment process publicly shredded. For parents already wavering on where to enrol their children, the scandal confirmed a suspicion many had quietly held for years that the system meant to educate their children was, in places, broken from the inside.

The results have followed the trust downward. Government school students increasingly struggle in board examinations and the gap widens further at the level of competitive exams like NEET and JEE, where systematic coaching and exposure matter enormously. Meanwhile, the city's well-known private schools proudly circulate the names of alumni who've secured seats at IITs, AIIMS, ISI, and universities abroad, an aura of success that government institutions can rarely match, not for lack of individual brilliance among their students, but for lack of institutional support behind them.

**Why the System Struggles to Catch Up**

None of this is really a story about lazy institutions or indifferent people. Government schools are structurally non profit public bodies they cannot simply conjure private school grade infrastructure without direct government investment and that investment has consistently lagged behind need. Teachers, for their part, are rarely trained specifically to coach students toward competitive examinations; their expertise lies within a curriculum, not within the specialised, incentive driven ecosystem that has grown up around exams like JEE and NEET. Many also feel disconnected from newer pedagogical trends, creating a generational gap between how they teach and how today's students learn.

There is also a quieter, more painful truth about who is still enrolling. Families choosing government schools today are disproportionately from lower middle class or economically disadvantaged backgrounds households where private school fees are simply out of reach, even as some strain themselves into debt trying to afford a better start for their child. Meanwhile, families with more means have largely exited the system entirely, understanding, correctly, that a child spends nearly a third of their waking life inside a school and that this time deserves to be invested wisely. Compounding the crisis, some families are pulled out of the education system altogether, as children are sent to earn rather than study, a symptom of the state's broader employment anxieties. Signs of an Attempted Turnaround

The state has not been blind to the crisis. Projectors and smart boards have been sent to schools that once had only chalk and blackboards. Animated learning videos have been introduced to try to close the engagement gap that glossy private school marketing exploits so well. Per student midday meal budgets have been raised, a small but meaningful acknowledgement that hunger and learning cannot be separated. Compulsory teacher training programmes have begun rolling out, an attempt to bridge the very generational gap that so many students describe feeling.

Whether these measures are enough remains an open question and perhaps the wrong one to ask in isolation. The deeper question is whether a system built on the promise of education for all can survive in a marketplace that has learned to sell education as a private ladder to individual success and whether Kolkata, a city that once made education its proudest export, is willing to fight for the idea that no child's classroom should ever stand empty.