India has 1.4 billion people. Of that total 250 million attend rural and urban schools about the same enrollment as China (2021). Consider that the U.S. schooled around 50 million students in the same year.

India’s system of public and private schooling is governed at the central, state, and local levels. About four out of five Indian students attend government schools, as they are called. The rest attend private and alternative kinds of schooling. Since two-thirds of India’s population live in rural areas, 70 percent of all Indian children attend school in those areas. Among adults, nearly 80 percent are literate as determined by the 2011 census (three decades earlier, literacy rate was 41 percent). See here.

Here are a few facts about the Indian system of schooling including how public schooling is organized:

What do rural and urban Indian classrooms look like? A sampling of photos in both…