Over 1 lakh single-teacher schools in India: Government
For the 2024-25 school year, India has over 1,04,000 schools run by just one teacher—serving about 33 lakh students.
Andhra Pradesh tops the chart with the most single-teacher schools, while Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of students packed into these classrooms.
States like Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Karnataka also have thousands of such schools, showing how unevenly teachers are spread out across the country.
What's being done to fix the situation?
A lot of these schools do not meet the norms meant to keep class sizes manageable (think 30 kids per teacher), making learning tough for both students and teachers.
To fix this, the government is merging smaller schools and moving teachers around—a move that's already cut single-teacher school numbers by six percent since 2022-23.
As one official put it, "schools with higher enrollments demonstrate better resource utilization."
Still, these numbers highlight big gaps in access to quality education depending on where you live in India.