Nearly 20,000 schools were shut down and around 1.9 lakh teachers lost their jobs in 2021-22, the Centre informed Parliament on Wednesday.

Minister of state for education Annpurna Devi shared the figures in response to a question by Congress Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Shukla.

In 2020-21, there were 15,09,136 schools in the country, including private and government-aided institutions.

In 2021-22, the number came down to 14,89,115. During the same period, the number of teachers declined to 95,07,123 from 96,96,425.

The government collects data on schools under its United District Information System for Education Plus.

“The decline in schools in 2021-22 is mainly due to the rationalisation of schools by various state governments and the closure of private and other schools during the pandemic,” the minister said.

The minister added: “Similarly, the main reason for the decline in the number of teachers is deployment of fewer teachers in private schools during the pandemic when schools were operating through online mode.” The Centre has been asking states to undertake rationalisation of schools.

In 2016, a group of government secretaries had recommended the consolidation or merger of schools with low enrolment. The Niti Aayog supported the proposal the following year.

During meetings with states, the then human resource development ministry encouraged them to merge small schools with the nearest schools.

Under the Right to Education Act, every class has to have a teacher. If a primary school has less than 50 children across five classes, it becomes expensive for the government to support such a school with five regular teachers, it was argued. Some states pursued the rationalisation aggressively.

Odisha decided to close down schools with less than 15 students and merge around 14,000 such schools with nearby schools. So far, it has closed down nearly 5,000 schools.

The rationalisation policy saw nearly 50,000 government schools being closed down between 2018-19 and 2020-21.

According to the UDISE+ data, there were 10,32,049 government schools in 2020-21 against 10,32,570 in 2019-20 and 10,83,678 in 2018-19.