Delhi Schools Crumbling Under Budget Squeeze: What Officials, Experts and Principals Are Saying

The Delhi government's Directorate of Education confirmed this week that at least 847 municipal school buildings across the capital require urgent structural repairs, with 214 of those classified as "dangerous" under a May 2026 Public Works Department survey. Officials have set a September 30 deadline to complete emergency retrofitting, but education administrators privately say the money isn't there to meet it.

The timing matters because July marks the end of the first quarter of the 2026-27 academic year — the window when school authorities typically flag mid-year failures to the education ministry. This year, those flags are arriving in bulk. The Aam Aadmi Party government, which built much of its political brand on the "school transformation" drive that began around 2016, is now defending that legacy against a BJP-led central government that has repeatedly audited Delhi's education budget, questioning whether the ₹16,278 crore allocated in the 2025-26 budget was deployed effectively.

On the Ground: Rohini, Okhla and the Shortage Nobody Announces

At Government Boys Senior Secondary School in Sector 11, Rohini, the principal has reportedly been managing a student roll of roughly 1,800 across a building designed for 1,200. Three classrooms designated for Class 9 share a single functioning washroom block. In Okhla's Jamia Nagar locality, two Sarvodaya Vidyalayas — the flagship full-service model schools that AAP has showcased internationally — are operating without functioning science labs after equipment deliveries stalled in March. The Directorate of Education has not publicly confirmed either situation.

Dr. Anita Rampal, a veteran curriculum expert affiliated with Delhi University's Central Institute of Education on the North Campus, has been one of the more vocal academic voices this month, arguing in education policy circles that infrastructure gaps are being masked by strong board result statistics. Delhi government schools posted a Class 12 pass rate of 93.4 percent in the 2025-26 CBSE results, a figure AAP has heavily publicised. Critics, including several school heads speaking informally to this reporter, say that number reflects strategic student retention policies rather than comprehensive learning outcomes.

The central government's own figures add another layer. The Ministry of Education's Unified District Information System for Education — known as UDISE+ — recorded in its 2024-25 report that Delhi had a student-to-classroom ratio of 38:1 in government schools, compared to a national average of 26:1. That gap, education economists at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Economic Studies have noted, correlates strongly with dropout risk in Classes 9 and 10.

University Tensions and the Fee Dispute That Won't Go Away

Delhi University is dealing with a separate but related pressure. The university's Academic Council meets again on July 10 to revisit a proposed 12 percent fee hike across undergraduate programmes that student unions, led by the National Students' Union of India and the All India Students' Association, have been contesting since April. Protests have run intermittently through the Arts Faculty building on the North Campus and outside the Vice-Chancellor's office on University Road. University officials maintain the increase is necessary to fund laboratory upgrades and faculty positions left vacant since 2023.

The fee dispute has also drawn in Ambedkar University Delhi, which operates campuses in Kashmere Gate and Karampura, where students in the School of Human Ecology have raised concerns about a parallel administrative fee increase that was introduced without faculty senate approval, according to internal documents reviewed by The Daily Delhi.

For families weighing their options right now: admissions for Class 6 under Delhi's neighbourhood school policy close on July 15, and the Directorate of Education has advised parents to verify infrastructure status on the Dilli Shiksha portal before confirming school selections. Education officers at the district level in South-West Delhi are holding walk-in sessions every Wednesday at the District Education Office in Dwarka Sector 10 through July 23. Whether those sessions produce answers, or more waiting lists, will depend on decisions being made in offices several kilometres away, and several pay grades up.