Three girls dead of snakebite in Gadchiroli, an eight-year-old dead in Nashik three weeks later, and 584 ashram-school deaths in Maharashtra alone in two years. This is not a mystery. It is a promise the state keeps funding and never quite finishes keeping.
On the night of August 9, six girls sleeping on the floor of a hostel dormitory in Japtalai village, Gadchiroli district, because there were not enough cots for the 79 students packed into that single room, were bitten by a snake. No warden was on duty. Three of them, Deepika Lakda, 12, Sushmita Mandal, 14, and Anu Koreti, 8, died before morning. The state government cancelled the school’s licence within a day, ordered a safety audit of all 511 aided ashram schools in Maharashtra, and had the headmaster and warden arrested; the school’s own trustee, a former member of Parliament, was later made a co-accused, and a Gadchiroli court denied him anticipatory bail as recently as September 10.
Barely three weeks after that audit was announced, an eight-year-old at a different ashram school, this one in Kalwan taluka of Nashik district, developed a fever, was taken to hospital, sent back to her hostel once she seemed to improve, and died overnight; three officials were suspended within days. Her death fell in the middle of a twelve-day hunger strike already under way by tribal students elsewhere in the same district, protesting conditions in the very schools the state had just promised to audit. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Maharashtra’s own Tribal Development Department disclosed that 584 ashram school students had died in the state over the preceding two years, from causes ranging from snakebite and sickle-cell complications to illness, accident and suicide.
None of it is confined to one state or one season. In July, 70 to 80 children fell ill after eating spoiled food at an ashram school in Amravati’s Melghat forest; further south, dozens more were hospitalised after suspected food poisoning at a girls’ ashram school in Telangana’s Warangal district. Versions of these nights recur, in one form or another, across India’s tribal belt: in the Santhal villages of Jharkhand, the PVTG settlements of Odisha, the tea-garden Adivasi colonies of Assam, and Banswara’s hills in Rajasthan. More than six decades after the Dhebar Commission, in 1961, first recommended residential ashram schools as the answer for tribal children in India’s most inaccessible regions, the institution built on that recommendation still struggles, in state after state, to reliably feed, staff and protect them.
Strip away the inauguration ribbons and the enrolment numbers underneath tell an equally sobering story. UDISE+ data for 2023-24 shows the Gross Enrolment Ratio for Scheduled Tribe students falling from 98.3 per cent at the primary level to just 48.7 per cent by higher secondary, close to half the cohort lost somewhere along the way. For ST girls specifically, enrolment drops from 97.4 per cent in elementary school to 78.5 per cent at secondary and 48.4 per cent by higher secondary. Meghalaya recorded a fall of 71.6 percentage points between elementary and secondary ST enrolment in a single year’s data; Bihar, 55.6 points.
Nationally, over 1.1 lakh schools still run on a single teacher, and nearly 32,000 report zero enrolment, a pattern concentrated overwhelmingly in the remote, forested and hilly terrain where most tribal habitations sit. There has been genuine improvement too: ST secondary enrolment ticked up from 63.0 to 66.9 per cent between 2023-24 and 2024-25, and Mizoram’s ST enrolment, at 97.8 per cent, is the highest of any social category in any state. What the national figure hides is that some parts of India have essentially solved this problem, while others, this August’s headlines suggest, have not even secured the basics.
The two flagship schemes built to close that gap have a story of their own to tell. Eklavya Model Residential Schools, the Centre’s showcase residential programme for tribal children, were meant to number 728 by this year; as of the last government count, 721 had been sanctioned and only 477 were actually functional, serving roughly 3.5 lakh students against a much larger need. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs told Parliament in 2022 that 41 per cent of EMRS teaching posts nationally were vacant, against a sanctioned requirement of over 7,000. A 2023 commitment to recruit 38,800 teachers and support staff within three years has quietly run past its own deadline with no public accounting of how many posts were actually filled. The older, far larger network of state-run Ashram Schools, first proposed under the Dhebar Commission in 1961, has fared worse simply because it has barely been counted at all: a parliamentary standing committee found only 862 such schools formally sanctioned nationwide and conceded that the data on the rest was too unreliable to summarise.
A hostel with 79 girls sleeping on the floor because there are not enough beds is not a freak occurrence; it is what an occupancy shortfall looks like the one night it goes wrong.
Maharashtra’s numbers put that undercounting in sharp relief. In 2016, a member of Parliament told the Lok Sabha that 882 tribal children had died in state-run Ashram Schools across the country over the preceding five years, 684 of them in Maharashtra alone between 2010 and 2015, a toll of roughly 137 deaths a year in that one state. This August’s disclosure of 584 deaths in Maharashtra’s ashram schools over just the last two years works out to close to 292 a year, more than double the earlier figure, even allowing for differences in how the two counts were compiled. The National Human Rights Commission has now opened suo motu notices on Maharashtra’s ashram schools twice inside a decade: once over reports that more than 500 Scheduled Tribe girls had died under suspicious circumstances over ten years, with abuse by staff also alleged, and again this August over the Gadchiroli snakebite deaths. There is no public record that the first notice was ever fully closed out before the second one was opened.
Taken separately, a snakebite, a missed diagnosis, a batch of spoiled food and an old committee report can each be filed away as its own contained mishap. Strung together, over one state, inside barely five weeks, they describe something closer to a system that keeps producing the same outcome through different routes. A hostel with 79 girls sleeping on the floor because there are not enough beds is not a freak occurrence; it is what an occupancy shortfall looks like the one night it goes wrong. A residential school running on 59 per cent of its sanctioned teaching strength cannot deliver the “quality education on par with Navodaya Vidyalayas” that EMRS was designed to promise, and cannot staff a night warden either. And a network with a documented decade of unexplained deaths and unresolved abuse allegations teaches Adivasi families, not unreasonably, that a government hostel is not an unambiguous act of opportunity. Each of these failures nudges families toward exactly the choice UDISE data shows thousands are already making: pulling children, especially daughters, out before secondary school begins.
The shortfall here is harder to excuse than it once was, because money is increasingly not the constraint. The Union Budget for 2025-26 raised the Ministry of Tribal Affairs’ allocation by nearly 46 per cent, to Rs 14,925.81 crore, with Rs 7,088.60 crore earmarked specifically for EMRS, enough, on paper, to finish what has been started. Yet that same year, Parliament’s own standing committee on social justice and empowerment had to formally direct the ministry to spend the funds it had already been given. An agency sitting on unspent allocations is not short of resources. It is short of the follow-through needed to turn a sanctioned budget line into enough cots for a hostel room, a night warden on duty, and a staffed classroom the next morning.
Nothing here is beyond repair, and Maharashtra’s own response to Gadchiroli shows both what urgency looks like and how quickly it can lapse. A licence cancelled within a day, an audit of 511 schools ordered within a week, arrests made within days: none of that prevented Kalwan, three weeks later, or the hunger strike still running in Nashik as this is written. Mizoram and much of the northeast demonstrate that near-universal tribal school retention is achievable inside India’s own borders. Jharkhand posted a sharply improved secondary dropout rate for 2024-25, evidence that the gap narrows quickly once it is actually worked on. What the rest of the country needs is less a new scheme than the discipline to finish auditing what it has already promised to audit: complete the safety review of all 511 Maharashtra schools and extend it nationwide rather than letting it fade after the next news cycle, fill the 41 per cent of EMRS posts still standing empty before sanctioning fresh schools that would only join them, and turn every NHRC notice on an ashram-school death into a standing commitment that is checked back on, publicly, rather than quietly allowed to lapse the way the first Maharashtra notice appears to have.
India speaks often of its Adivasi communities as custodians of forest and culture worth protecting. It says far less, and does considerably less, about the schools it built in their name and never finished staffing, funding or supervising properly. A filled warden’s post on the night of August 9 would have said more about that commitment than any inquiry ordered the morning after. Sixty-five years after the Dhebar Commission first recommended residential schooling as the answer, and several committees since that have said much the same thing, the fair question is not whether India cares about its Adivasi children, but when the provisioning will finally catch up with the caring.
NOTE: Views expressed in this opinion are authors’ own and may not be found in accord with those of GMK
