Primary School Enrolment of Girls in India: Progress, Disparities and Challenges

Girls enrollment in primary education is an important measure of educational inclusion, gender equality and human-capital development. There has been significant progress made in India in terms of constitutional and legal commitment, extensive public programmes, expansion of school infrastructure and efforts to increase the direct and indirect cost of schooling. However, gender parity at the national level can mask disparities in patterns of age-appropriate enrolment, school-management choice, state-level performance, retention rates, infrastructure limitations and household constraint. The study analyzes the progress, gender gaps and ongoing issues in girls' primary school enrolment in India on the basis of secondary data and published evidence up to 31 December 2024. The primary data source has been the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2023-24, with support from the previous UDISE+ (2022-23), the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2022, evidence from the National Sample Survey, government policy documents and peer-reviewed literature. Data is analyzed using descriptive, comparative, ratio, trend and policy analyses. There were 51.62 million girls enrolled in primary school in 2023-24. The primary Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) for girls was 94.3 and for boys was 91.8, with the Net Enrolment Ratio (NER) for girls being 80.6 and boys 77.5. Nevertheless there are significant interstate disparities and there was the school-management segmentation, with gender parity (c. 50.2%) in government schools, and less than parity (c. 44.0%) in private unaided recognised schools. The results show that India has largely addressed its basic national-level gender gap in primary enrolment, but it has yet to reach universal, age-appropriate, gender-equality and sustained participation. Policy going forward needs to shift from numerical parity to high-level parity in enrolment, attendance, retention, learning and transition.