Who leaves school, and when

Enrolment is nearly universal. Completion is not. The loss happens at predictable points.

UDISE+ records every recognised school in the country, which makes India's education data unusually complete. It shows enrolment close to full at the primary stage and a sharp fall at the transition to secondary — earlier for girls in some states, earlier for boys in others.

Annual snapshots hide this, because a class that shrinks looks like a smaller cohort rather than a loss. Following the same cohort across stages shows where students actually leave, which is the only version of the number a school board can act on.

What we measure

These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.

Indicator	Unit	Source and year
Net enrolment ratio	% ages 6-14	UDISE+Data year: 2023-24
Dropout rate, secondary stage	%	UDISE+Data year: 2023-24
Transition rate, upper primary to secondary	%	UDISE+Data year: 2023-24
Pupil-teacher ratio	ratio	UDISE+Data year: 2023-24

What we publish

A cohort dashboard that follows a year group across stages instead of comparing annual snapshots.

The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.

Where these numbers come from

How we handle gaps

Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.

Reuse

Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.