Schooling in Kashmir: Are parents really left with only two choices?

By: Fayaz M.

A government school teacher draws full salary whether 5 children walk in or 500.

A private school owner draws full profit whether he teaches your child or just markets to you.

Somewhere between these two failures, an entire generation of Kashmiri children is falling through the cracks.

I am writing this as a father. Not as a founder, not as a businessman. Just as someone who has to decide, like every parent reading this, where to send his child — and realising both doors in front of him are broken.

This is not a Srinagar problem. Not a “poor family” problem. Not a “private school parent” problem.

Doctor, bureaucrat, shopkeeper, labourer — your child’s education is being failed. Just in a different way, depending on your bank balance.

Let’s start with government schools.

J&K has shut down 4,386 government schools in five years. That’s not a typo. Almost one in five — gone. A rate eleven times the national average.

Over 51,000 children vanished from government school rolls in just two years.

More than 16,000 government schools, by the state’s own data, run with fewer than 50 students. Some run with none.

And yet — the School Education Department still draws close to ₹13,000 crore from the UT budget every year. Most of it locked into salaries and administration. Regardless of how many children actually show up.

Government school was supposed to be a public good. Something a bureaucrat’s child and a labourer’s child could sit in, side by side.

Today, it is what’s left for families who have no other option. We built a system meant for everyone, and quietly turned it into a shelter for the poorest.

Now the other failure.

J&K has over 5,500 private schools. Almost every single one is registered as a “trust” — meaning, on paper, not-for-profit.

In reality? Only a small fraction are genuine, community-run, service-first institutions.

The rest are businesses. For-profit in every way that matters — except the paperwork, which exists purely to dodge tax and regulatory scrutiny.

Here’s a number every parent already feels in their gut:

A family today can spend, across five years of school fees, what it costs to put their son through an entire engineering degree.

For school. Not college.

Some of these schools sell “elite.” Some sell “religion.” Some fabricate “academic excellence” with a glossy prospectus and a rented auditorium.

None of them are driven by service. They are driven by margins.

And where is the government in all this — the one body whose entire job is to regulate, not spectate?

Mostly silent. In places, uncomfortably close to the very schools it should be auditing.

Education is not retail. It is not hospitality. You cannot leave it to “market forces” and hope it sorts itself out. It is the load-bearing wall under everything else we build as a society.

So what do we do?

One — for government schools bleeding out in silence, especially across Srinagar, stop pretending they’re functioning. Shut them, merge them, redirect that budget. For schools with genuinely high rolls, make them extraordinary — free transport, clean classrooms, real seating, the best teachers the system can attract. Stop spreading resources thin across half-empty buildings.

Two — take a real share of that same budget and route it straight to schools that are genuinely not-for-profit. Low fee. High service. Proven community institutions already doing more with less. Give them fuel to scale, instead of just survive.

Three — for the cronies: build a neutral School Council. Government, judiciary, independent experts from outside J&K, civil society — all in the room together. Audit every private school’s books. Any school minting crores a month gets forced to declare itself “for-profit.” No more hiding behind a trust registration it never earned. Let it operate freely on market terms after that — fully taxed, fully accountable. The Council sets minimum bars — infrastructure, curriculum, teacher pay, learning outcomes — audits every school against them, and publishes results on a public portal.

Full transparency. Zero opacity.

Because right now, any building with a signboard calls itself an “International School” — including ones paying their teachers ₹15,000 a month, with zero learning outcomes and zero rigour to show for it.

No bar. No audit. No consequence.

If the government keeps playing mute spectator, we are not heading toward a crisis. We are already in one — we’ve just agreed not to call it that.

This is not their problem to fix alone. It’s ours.

So tell me — which system failed you? The government school with no teachers, or the private school that emptied your pockets and gave your child nothing but a fancy blazer?

The writer is founder and CEO of HELPRUSH services company. Opinions expressed in this article are personal.