India's government schools and hospitals: data rich, record poor

UDISE+ 2023-24 records about 98.3 percent of schools with drinking water, about 97.2 percent with separate girls toilets and about 92 percent with electricity. Those are reported connections, not working services.

The functional layer tells another story. Roughly 1.52 lakh schools lack functional electricity. About 57.2 percent have functional computers, about 53.9 percent have internet and about 52.3 percent have ramps. Of 10.17 lakh government schools, only 3.37 lakh have a toilet friendly to children with special needs, and only about 30.6 percent of those work.

UDISE+ 2024-25 reports better numbers again, including 99.3 percent drinking water and 93.7 percent electricity. Part of that is genuine improvement and part of it is a change in method. UDISE+ itself warns that data from 2022-23 onward is not strictly comparable with earlier editions because collection moved from school level to student level.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, in its 368th report tabled in August 2025, put about 10 lakh sanctioned teaching posts vacant nationally, roughly 7.5 lakh of them at elementary level. An Education Ministry reply in the Lok Sabha in December 2023 put the figure at about 8.4 lakh. Earlier committee work put it near 9.8 lakh. These are different cuts on different dates. They should be attributed individually and never averaged.

At the same time, UDISE+ 2023-24 records about 1.1 lakh single teacher schools serving roughly 40 lakh children, and about 12,964 schools with zero enrolment still employing about 31,981 teachers. National pupil teacher ratios sit within the NEP 2020 benchmark, while state level gaps stay wide.

Both facts are true because deployment follows legacy registers rather than current demand. Neither register is wrong. They are simply never read against each other.

The CAG performance audit of PM POSHAN in Odisha, tabled on 31 March 2026 and covering 2018 to 2023, found more meals recorded than students present, an inability to verify that meals were served at all, students deprived of 3,479.62 quintals of rice and 1.87 crore rupees of cooking cost on examination days, and 1,51,654 meals missed across 416 schools on observance days.

The same state utilised only 44 to 50 percent of Samagra Shiksha funds between 2018 and 2023, while 3.51 lakh students went without uniforms and textbooks arrived more than a year late. In 2024-25, states spent about 62 percent of approved Samagra Shiksha budgets on average.

These are state audits covering specific periods. They establish a pattern rather than a national quantification, and they should be read as representative case evidence.

Rural Health Statistics 2021-22, released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on 12 January 2023, states plainly that there is a shortfall of 79.5 percent of specialists at community health centres against the requirement for existing centres. Surgeons stand at 83.2 percent, obstetricians and gynaecologists at 74.2 percent, physicians at 79.1 percent and paediatricians at 81.6 percent.

State data for 2023-24 shows Punjab with over 80 percent of community health centre specialist posts vacant, and not one centre carrying its full four specialist complement.

CAG audits released across 2024 and 2025 found Delhi hospitals buying 33 to 47 percent of essential drugs from local chemists between 2016 and 2022, Chhattisgarh district hospitals missing 103 of 272 essential drugs, equipment worth 7.28 crore rupees idling in Kerala for want of staff or maintenance contracts, and 688.79 crore rupees of National Health Mission money left unspent in Maharashtra in 2021-22.

A widely quoted health ministry survey finding that 25 to 30 percent of equipment in government hospitals is non functional dates to 2015. Treat it as a historical baseline rather than a current measurement.

National Health Mission utilisation ran at roughly 62 percent in 2023-24 on figures compiled by research bodies from official records. That compilation is a secondary source.

NITI Aayog designed the National Health Stack explicitly to prevent the accumulation of detached silos. The National Digital Health Blueprint warns of fragmented data capture and compartmentalisation. On the education side, UDISE+ only began shifting from school level to student level records in 2023-24.

Health data is captured across HMIS, drug management systems and physical registers that do not reconcile with each other. Education, health, public works and finance each hold a piece of the same institution. Nobody holds the institution.

Government has already committed to outcome based budgeting, and some health money is already linked to index performance. The gap is not intent and it is not data collection. The gap is the per institution operational join those national frameworks do not reach.

CHETRA is being built for that join: one record per school and per hospital, a published formula that ranks what needs work first, an allocation against the envelope already sanctioned, and sign off gated on evidence.

We have not built all of it. Condition, priority, budget and verification run on the public site today, on simulated data. Attendance, meals, medicines, vendors and payroll are under construction. Nothing on this site is a government record.