India's school data system began as DISE and was expanded into UDISE, which from 2012-13 collected school information on paper formats that were then keyed in at block or district level. That route was slow and error-prone. UDISE+ moved collection online from 2018-19, letting schools enter and verify data directly and shortening the lag between collection and publication. The system now serves a second purpose beyond planning: it is the yardstick against which NEP 2020 targets are tracked, which is why the 2025-26 report is organised by the policy's Foundational, Preparatory, Middle and Secondary stages rather than by the older primary and upper-primary categories. Comparing a UDISE+ figure across years therefore requires care about which classification the earlier figure used.

The strong numbers and the weak ones sit next to each other in the same report, and the exam-relevant reading is in the gap. Access has largely been solved at the lower stages — a 99.2% transition from Foundational to Preparatory and 98.5% retention at the Foundational stage leave little room to improve. The problem has moved upward: Secondary GER is 71.7% against a Middle stage GER of 89.6%, Secondary retention is 51.9%, and the Secondary dropout rate of 7.0% is the highest of the three stages reported. A second gap is infrastructural rather than educational: 99.5% of schools have safe drinking water but only 58.2% have ramps with handrails, which is an accessibility gap for Children with Special Needs, and only 29.9% have rainwater harvesting. Finally, the fall in zero-enrolment schools to 5,663 and in single-teacher schools to 1,00,843 reflects consolidation and teacher redeployment rather than new capacity — a favourable national PTR of 24:1 can coexist with individual schools that remain under-staffed.