ASPIRATIONAL NUH DISTRICT IN HARYANA, ABANDONED EDUCATION

Haryana's Nuh district ranks the lowest in the State board examination results, which were released earlier in May. With a 45% dropout rate after Class 10, officials blame cheating, teachers cite staff shortage, and parents question the value of education amid poor employment opportunities in the State

- Samridhi Tewari reports

Every day, Jitender Kumar, in his early 30s, travels from Bahadurgarh city to Otha village in Nuh district, Haryana, 131 kilometres away. Kumar is a Hindi teacher at the Senior Secondary School in Otha, and takes a bus and an auto to reach the children he guides.

It's a hot, humid day in May, just before the school breaks for summer vacation. Kumar rests his head on a plastic chair, under a fan placed inside a 10x12-foot classroom. The electricity may go off any time, and then the class will sometimes move to the shade of a tree.

The walls are blue, chipped; the grey cement floor is cracked, and students sit on a torn, dusty cotton mat, their bags beside them on the ground. The fan doesn't reach the corners of the room. As the bell rings for lunch, the children squat in rows. Each is given a thali: watery dal and some rice. There is very little space to move around, but the children behave as they would in any other school: playfully collapsing on to each other, some smiling, some bored.

Kumar tries to cool off after having spent a day juggling subjects he barely knows. A postgraduate teacher (PGT), qualified to teach Hindi in the senior school, he also muddles through the English texts with students of Class 12. There has been no English teacher here since December 2022. This year, Kumar taught 13 children; all failed in the Haryana School Education Board (HSEB) examinations.

In 2025, Nuh performed the worst in the results across Haryana districts. Class 10 recorded a pass percentage of 73.90 (up to 13,862 students appeared; 10,244 passed), as per Haryana's Education Department. Class 12 registered a pass percentage of 45.76 (only 7,588 students appeared; 3,472 students passed). The top results were from Rewari at 96.85% in Class 10, and Jind at 91.05% for Class 12.