• By RK News
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• 30 Mar 2026

Payroll Without Purpose

Rs 13,816 crore paid for teachers in schools with no students Data confirms what parents already knew: system has collapsed

Srinagar, Mar 29: In “An Uncertain Glory”, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen identified a lethal flaw in Indian public education: its failure is not one of money, but of accountability, a system where money flows, posts are filled, and registers are maintained, yet no mechanism connects any of that activity to the learning of an actual child.  The J&K Legislative Assembly's written reply, tabled last week, is the most precise official confirmation this Union Territory has produced of that diagnosis. Since 2019, ₹13,816 crore has been paid in teacher salaries across 3,192 schools where fewer than ten students or none at all were enrolled. The investment was made. The accountability was not. There is an institutional dishonesty that operates in plain sight, sustained not by secrecy but by silence. Every district education officer in J&K knew the classrooms were empty. Every budget allocation committee that processed salary disbursements knew that the children the system claimed to be educating had long since been moved by their families to private schools. Education Minister Sakina Itoo's written reply to BJP MLA Ranbir Singh Pathania confirmed it in numbers so stark that no administrative euphemism can soften them: 3,192 government schools across J&K have fewer than ten students or none at all, collectively employing 2,518 teachers, at a cost of ₹13,816 crore since 2019. That is not a crisis approaching. That is a crisis that arrived, was ignored, and has now been formally acknowledged. The Geography of Failure The data concentrates blame, revealing how decades of administrative decisions have produced structurally different disasters in J&K's two divisions. In the Jammu division, 1,494 near-empty schools carry 1,934 teachers on their

payrolls. In the Kashmir division, 1,698 such schools employ only 584. Jammu has fewer such schools but nearly three-and-a-half times the teacher deployment, the sediment of disproportionate staffing, politically motivated postings, and an absent rationalisation mechanism that allowed the imbalance to become a financial haemorrhage. Within Jammu, Kathua leads with 508 low-enrolment schools; Udhampur, where salary expenditure alone has reached ₹2,600 crore since 2019, follows with 188; Rajouri has 174; Reasi, 161; Jammu district, 130. In the Kashmir division, Baramulla leads with 396 near-empty schools, followed by Shopian with 270, Kupwara with 228, Anantnag with 168, and Bandipora with 156. These are not abstract administrative coordinates. There are specific places where specific children stopped attending government schools because those schools stopped being worth attending. What ₹13,816 Crore Bought The salary-expenditure figure deserves to be read slowly. Of the ₹13,816 crore spent since 2019 in schools where enrolment had collapsed, ₹13,770 crore was in the Jammu division; Kashmir's share was ₹46.66 crore. Udhampur accounts for ₹2,600 crore; Rajouri, ₹1,925.70 crore; Kathua, ₹1,830 crore; Doda, ₹1,680.77 crore. Baramulla, Kashmir's most affected district, tops the valley's expenditure column at ₹9.54 crore. These numbers do not describe investment in education. They describe the cost of institutional inertia as a system that continued paying for a service it had stopped delivering. Every rupee spent in those empty schools was a rupee that could not reach quality teachers, laboratory equipment, digital infrastructure, or the actual children of J&K who now attend school, increasingly and overwhelmingly, in the private sector. Why Parents Left First The crisis is a confidence story. Families, including those with the least economic room to manoeuvre, concluded that government schools in J&K were producing no usable outcome for

their children and acted on that conclusion long before any legislature confirmed their judgment. ASER 2024 data provides the evidentiary foundation. Over 52 per cent of Class VIII students in J&K government schools cannot read a basic Class II-level text. Government school enrolment slipped from 58.3 per cent in 2018 to 55.5 per cent in 2022, recovering marginally to 57.2 per cent in 2024, a story of structural, not cyclical, confidence collapse. In the most recent year on record, government school enrolment in J&K fell by 28,013 students while private school rolls rose by 52,145. Schools that operated for fewer than 150 days in 2024–25 against a mandated 220 cannot sustain a parent's confidence, regardless of the teachers nominally on their rolls. The Accountability Question The government has closed or merged 1,732 schools since 2019, yet 3,192 remain open with fewer than ten students. The deeper question the Assembly data forces into the open is simpler: who authorised the continuation of 2,518 teacher postings in schools with no students to teach? Who signed the salary orders? Who certified those schools as functional? The teachers are not the story; they occupy posts that the system created and sustained. The story is a system that knew what was happening in its classrooms and kept the payroll running regardless. The J&K government now has these numbers on the floor of its own Assembly. Whether they become the foundation of a serious restructuring of public education or merely another data point that enters the record and changes nothing will determine whether this Legislature can govern the crisis it has inherited. The classrooms are waiting.