7,000 RTE seats lie vacant in Gujarat despite record applications. Why?

Gujarat’s schools have undergone two rounds of centralised online allotments for Class 1. However, more than 7,000 seats, reserved under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, are still vacant. This is largely due to parents refusing to commit to non-preferred institutions. 

As per the latest data from the state education department, 9,157 RTE seats are unfilled even after the second round. A significant portion of these – 5,263 – are in English-medium schools, followed by 1,800 in Gujarati-medium schools.

This year, the government raised the income eligibility limit for RTE admissions to ₹6 lakh. As a result, a record 1,75,685 applications were received for 93,860 seats across 9,741 private schools.

In the first round of allotment, only 80,461 of the 86,274 children offered seats confirmed their admission, leaving 5,813 seats vacant. 

In the second round, more schools were added, taking the number of available seats up to 94,798. Here, another 7,006 admissions were processed, bringing the total number of confirmed seats to 87,467, and leaving 7,331 seats still vacant. 

While the government plans to hold a third round of admissions to fill these remaining seats, the bigger question is why families are choosing not to take up offered admissions. This suggests families might be getting seats at schools they don't want, finding better alternatives, facing practical barriers like location and transport issues, or having second thoughts about the RTE admission process. 

The real story is about utilisation rates and why families aren’t taking up available RTE seats, not about seat shortages.