Telangana has 5,001 single-teacher government schools, says NITI Aayog report
A NITI Aayog report revealed that Telangana has 5,001 single-teacher government schools with over 62,000 students enrolled. The state also ranked second in the country for zero-enrolment schools, highlighting major challenges in the government school education system
Hyderabad: One teacher, five classes, 18 subjects. This is the reality in thousands of Telangana government-run schools.
A staggering 20 per cent of the 24,000 government schools in the state were operating with a single teacher. This was revealed in the NITI Aayog’s latest report, “School Education System in India”, released in May 2026.
Telangana, according to the report, is home to 5,001 government and local body schools that have just a single teacher, exposing a deep crisis in the school education system. In fact, these schools reported 62,288 students on their rolls. This means students in these schools depend on only one teacher for their academics.
Of the total single-teacher schools, most are at the primary level. Students of Classes I and II have three subjects each, while Classes III to V study four subjects each. Altogether, 18 subjects have to be taught every day, and all these subjects are handled by a single teacher.
The report revealed that Telangana figured among the top 10 states with the highest number of single-teacher schools. Overall, 1,04,125 single-teacher schools were recorded across the country, with a total of 33,76,769 students on the rolls.
Further, Telangana, according to the report based on the Unified District Information System on Education Plus data for the academic year 2024-25, also ranked second among all states in terms of zero-enrolment schools.
While West Bengal ranked first with 3,812 such schools, Telangana reported 2,245 zero-enrolment schools with 1,016 teachers on the rolls. In comparison, Karnataka has 270 zero-enrolment schools, Madhya Pradesh 463, Tamil Nadu 311 and Rajasthan 215.
Overall, 7,993 zero-enrolment schools were recorded across the country, and these schools had 20,817 teachers.
