Addressing India’s Educational Growth Imbalances: The Urban-Rural Divide

India now runs the world’s second-largest higher education system, with over four crore students enrolled in more than a thousand universities. At the same time, a child in a government school in rural Bihar or Chhattisgarh may still be sharing a multigrade classroom with no functional toilet nearby. This is the paradox at the heart of India’s educational growth story: the country has built gleaming institutions of higher learning while primary education, the foundation everything else rests on, continues to lag behind. Understanding this imbalance is central to any conversation about equitable development in India today.

Two Indias, one education system 🔗

India’s literacy rate has climbed from a mere 18.3% at independence to nearly 73% today, a genuine achievement by any measure. But this national average hides a sharp split. Urban literacy stands at 88.9%, compared to 77.5% in rural areas, and the gap widens further when you look at what happens after basic literacy, at who actually reaches college and who drops out along the way.

The disparity is not just about literacy. It runs through access itself. While 91% of Indians have a primary school within a kilometre of home, this falls to 72% for upper primary and just 48% for secondary school. In other words, the further a child tries to climb the educational ladder, the more distance, and disadvantage, stands in the way, especially outside cities.

The higher education boom 🔗

Numbers that tell a story 🔗

Over the past decade, India’s higher education sector has expanded at a remarkable pace. The number of universities grew from 760 in 2014-15 to 1,289 in 2023-24, a jump of nearly 70%, while colleges rose from 38,498 to 48,246. Total enrolment touched 4.5 crore students, and the Gross Enrolment Ratio climbed from 23.7% to 30% over the same period. Every year brings new IITs, private universities, and skill development institutes, most of them concentrated in metropolitan and semi-urban belts.

Who really benefits 🔗

This expansion is genuinely good news, but it has not been evenly shared. New universities and well-funded colleges cluster around cities where infrastructure, faculty, and student demand already exist. Students from urban, relatively affluent households are best positioned to benefit, since they come from schools that prepared them adequately for competitive entrance exams and college-level study. A student from a rural government school, by contrast, often reaches Class 12 without ever having encountered a functioning science lab or a teacher trained in the subject they are examined on. The doors of higher education have opened wider, but not everyone starts the race from the same point.

Primary education’s quiet crisis 🔗

Enrolment isn’t the same as learning 🔗

On paper, Indian primary education looks like a success story. Enrolment among children aged 6 to 14 is above 95%. But nearly half of Grade 5 students in rural areas cannot read a Grade 2 level text, and less than a third can perform basic division. Getting children into school, it turns out, is only half the problem. Keeping them learning once they are there is the harder, less visible challenge, and it is one that disproportionately affects rural India.

Government data confirms this slow crawl. The proportion of Std III children able to read a Std II level text moved from just 20.9% in 2018 to 23.4% in 2024, according to the Annual Status of Education Report. Progress is happening, but at a pace that leaves an entire generation of rural children behind their urban peers before they even reach secondary school.

Infrastructure gaps that persist 🔗

Much of this learning gap traces back to basic infrastructure and resources. Rural schools often function with fewer trained teachers, overcrowded and multigrade classrooms, and patchy digital access. Only about 18% of rural schools have internet access compared to nearly 47% in urban schools, a gap that became painfully visible during pandemic-era remote learning and hasn’t fully closed since. When online resources, smart classrooms, and even qualified science and math teachers are scarce in a village school, the quality of primary education inevitably suffers, regardless of how many children are technically enrolled.

Why the imbalance took root 🔗

Part of the answer lies in how independent India approached education policy. Early decades of planning tended to prioritise visible, prestige-building investments, elite technical institutes, central universities, research centres, over the unglamorous, decentralised work of running millions of village primary schools well. Scholars studying Indian development have long pointed out that basic education did not receive the sustained attention its foundational importance warranted, even as the country invested seriously in higher and technical education. This pattern shows up clearly in outcomes: an academic review of educational attainment in India found that even after decades of expansion, only about 8% of the adult population held a higher education qualification, while roughly a third remained illiterate, a sign that growth at the top was never matched by a strong enough base.

Urban local bodies and better-off state governments have also historically had more resources, more political voice, and more capacity to expand tertiary institutions, while rural, poorer, and remote regions struggled simply to keep primary schools staffed and functional. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: cities get better schools, colleges, and jobs, which draws talent and investment further toward urban centres, while rural regions are left playing catch-up at every level.

What balanced growth could look like 🔗

NEP 2020’s promise 🔗

The National Education Policy 2020 was designed partly as a response to this imbalance. It rests on five stated pillars, Access, Equity, Quality, Affordability, and Accountability, and specifically proposes measures such as a Gender Inclusion Fund and Special Education Zones aimed at disadvantaged regions. These are meaningful commitments on paper. The policy explicitly recognises that expanding higher education further, while leaving foundational literacy and numeracy weak, would only deepen inequality rather than solve it.

What still needs to happen 🔗

Turning policy intent into ground reality requires sustained, unglamorous investment: recruiting and properly training teachers for rural postings, ensuring every school has functional toilets, electricity, and internet, and tracking learning outcomes rather than just enrolment numbers. Strengthening early childhood and foundational literacy programmes in underserved districts would do more for long-term equity than another wave of new universities in already well-served cities. Community involvement, regular learning assessments, and targeted funding for the states and districts with the weakest indicators, many of them in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and similar regions, would help close the gap where it is widest.

None of this means slowing down higher education growth. India needs both a strong university system and a strong foundation beneath it. But policy attention and funding have leaned heavily toward the visible, prestige end of the system for decades. Rebalancing that, putting real weight behind primary education in rural and underserved areas, is what will determine whether India’s educational growth becomes broad-based or remains a story of two very different systems operating side by side.

What do you think? Should India slow the pace of new university and college openings to redirect funding toward strengthening rural primary schools, or can both be expanded simultaneously without one coming at the cost of the other?

References

1. https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/197104/indias-literacy-achievements
2. https://scroll.in/article/1080637/what-underpins-indias-deep-education-inequality
3. https://ddindia.co.in/2026/08/indias-higher-education-sector-records-significant-expansion-over-a-decade-female-enrolment-outpaces-overall-growth/
4. https://riseprogramme.org/publications/indias-new-national-education-policy-evidence-and-challenges.html
5. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2025/feb/doc202524496601.pdf
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738059313000436
7. https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/cabinet-approves-national-education-policy-2020-paving-way-for-transformational-reforms-in-school-and-higher-education-systems-in-the-country/