Imagine 100 kids walk into a Gujarat secondary school.
By the time they're supposed to finish, 16 of them are gone.
Not transferred. Not graduated early.
Just… gone.
That's the number the Education Ministry just flagged in its 2025-26 UDISE+ report — and it's landed Gujarat squarely in the 'red zone'.
Gujarat's secondary school dropout rate: 15.7%.
National average: 9.5%.
That's not a small gap. That's the state running at nearly double the country's dropout rate.
And it gets worse further up the ladder.
Every single metric, worse than the country's average.
Here's the twist — Gujarat's primary schools are doing fine. Zero dropout rate. Kids are walking in.
The cracks show up later.
Officials point to a familiar, uncomfortable list:
The higher secondary enrolment trend tells its own story — from over 40% in 2022-23, crashing to just 24% in 2024-25, before crawling back to 29% this year.
In June, Gujarat ran its annual Shala Praveshotsav enrolment drive — a program that's been running for two decades.
The target: bring back 6.4 lakh students who'd dropped out the previous year.
The result after three days: 50,000 children still out of school.
One bright spot — zero-enrolment schools (campuses with literally no students) dropped from 63 to 58 out of 53,425 schools.
A small win, buried in a much bigger problem.
Getting kids into school was never the hard part for Gujarat.
Keeping them there — that's the fight it's still losing.
That's all for now!
