How Delhi's Schools Ended Up Here: A Decade of Promises, Politics and Patchy Progress

Delhi's government schools enrol roughly 18 lakh students across 1,024 campuses managed by the Directorate of Education. That number alone explains why every election cycle in the capital turns, at least partly, into an argument about classrooms. This week, with fresh data from the National Achievement Survey circulating in South Block and AAP pushing its own performance figures ahead of the next municipal review, the question of how the city's schools got to their current state is worth taking seriously.

The short answer: a decade of genuine investment, fierce inter-governmental rivalry, and a funding architecture that was always more complicated than either side admitted.

The Making of a 'School Revolution'

The story starts in 2015, when the Aam Aadmi Party swept to power with 67 of 70 seats and promptly declared education its signature cause. The Delhi government's education budget climbed from around Rs 5,500 crore in 2015-16 to more than Rs 16,500 crore by 2023-24 — a threefold increase that funded the Happiness Curriculum, Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum, and the controversial School of Specialised Excellence programme, which now runs 36 campuses across areas including Dwarka, Rohini and Lajpat Nagar.

The Happiness Curriculum, introduced in 2018 for Classes 1 through 8, drew delegations from Finland and Singapore. The CBSE pass rate in government schools rose from 88 percent in 2015 to 98 percent by 2022. Infrastructure visibly changed at schools like GGSSS Mehram Nagar near IGI Airport and Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in Shalimar Bagh, where classrooms were rebuilt and libraries stocked. These were real changes, documented by independent assessors including the ASER Centre.

But the picture was never clean. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi — which runs approximately 1,700 primary schools across the city and was under BJP control until 2022 — operated on a separate, chronically underfunded track. MCD schools, concentrated in areas like Sangam Vihar, Trilokpuri and parts of Outer Delhi, often lacked functional toilets as late as 2021. The two school systems, one under the state government, one under the civic body, served overlapping populations but answered to political rivals who had little incentive to coordinate. That structural split produced children who completed well-resourced government middle schools and then transferred to MCD primaries that had never been upgraded — or vice versa.

Central Pressure and the University Question

The friction with the Centre added another layer. Ambedkar University Delhi, established under a state act in 2007 and headquartered in Kashmere Gate, spent years in a funding grey zone — the University Grants Commission, which answers to the Ministry of Education in New Delhi, classified it as a state university, limiting central grants. Enrolment grew to around 4,500 students by 2024, but faculty hiring remained frozen at various points due to disputes over pay scales that required both state and central sign-off.

Delhi University, by contrast, is centrally funded and has 90 constituent colleges — including Lady Shri Ram in Lajpat Nagar and Hindu College in North Campus — that benefited from the National Education Policy 2020 rollout more smoothly. The contrast between centrally administered DU and state-run ambedkar became a small but pointed symbol of the broader Centre-state standoff.

The AAP government's 2021-22 plan to build a new university campus in Rohini Sector 15 has moved slowly; land acquisition disputes pushed the projected completion date past 2025. It has not opened yet.

For parents navigating this system right now, the practical calculus is unchanged: government school quality varies enormously by zone and by whether the school falls under state or MCD administration. Families in Chandni Chowk and Civil Lines who can afford private tuition — Rs 2,000 to Rs 8,000 a month at the coaching centres clustered around Kamla Nagar — are hedging against both systems. The ones who cannot are waiting to see whether the reunified MCD, now under AAP since December 2022, actually closes the gap between its 1,700 primaries and the state's more visible secondary schools. The next ASER report, expected in early 2027, will be the first real measure of whether that political reunion translated into anything a child in a classroom could feel.