TL;DR
- Book deprivation in India is not just about poverty – it is about geography, school type, distribution failures, and a second-hand book market that has never been built at scale.
- States like Bihar, Odisha, and Jharkhand see secondary dropout rates of 15-26%, with indirect costs – including books – cited as a primary driver.
- Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Himachal Pradesh lead in both book access and learning outcomes, revealing what is possible when states treat educational materials as infrastructure rather than household expenses.
- 76.6% of Class 3 students could not read a Class 2-level text – a foundational crisis that begins, in many cases, with not having the right books at the right time.
- Tamil Nadu distributed 4.3 crore textbooks worth ₹311 crore for the 2025-26 academic year alone. Odisha extended free textbooks to private Odia-medium schools. These are models, not exceptions.
- NCERT’s textbook shortage in Kendriya Vidyalayas in 2025 – four months into the school year, students still without books – showed that even where intent exists, distribution fails.
- A functioning peer-to-peer book exchange, state by state, can fill gaps that policy and procurement cannot.
Here is a question that rarely gets asked in exactly this way: which Indian state is hardest to be a student in?
Not in terms of exam pressure, teaching quality, or school infrastructure – though all of those matter. In the specific, material sense: where are students most likely to sit in a classroom without the books they need? Where does “access to education” become a phrase that describes enrolment without the tools to learn?
The answer is not a single state. It is a pattern – visible in dropout data, in ASER learning outcomes, in household expenditure surveys, and in the quiet, compounding disadvantage that comes from starting a school year without a complete set of books. That pattern has a geography. It runs through the eastern and central states, intensifies in rural pockets of states that otherwise perform well, and – as the data will show – it is not simply a story of poverty. It is also a story of distribution, of market failure, and of what happens when no one builds the infrastructure for books to travel from one student to the next.
Understanding Book Deprivation: It Is Not One Thing
Before going state by state, it is worth being precise about what “book deprivation” actually means – because it takes different forms in different contexts, and conflating them leads to incomplete answers.
Type 1: Absolute deprivation – no books at all
This is the situation facing students in government schools where distribution has failed, or families so economically constrained that even subsidised NCERT books represent an unmanageable expense. It is more common in rural areas of eastern and central India.
Type 2: Partial deprivation – incomplete sets
A student has some books but not all. This is far more widespread than absolute deprivation, and its effects on learning are underappreciated. A child without the right textbook for a single subject can fall behind in that subject over an entire academic year.
Type 3: Edition deprivation – wrong books
Families using older editions because they cannot afford new ones, or because the right edition is not available locally. In areas with poor bookshop access, this is a structural problem.
Type 4: Affordability deprivation – books exist but cost too much
This is the dominant form in private schools. The books are available. The family simply cannot absorb the cost without making a trade-off somewhere else. This category is largest in absolute numbers and most invisible in policy discourse.
Type 5: Distribution deprivation – books exist but don’t arrive
The NCERT/KV situation in 2025 was a sharp example of this: government-mandated, officially available books that simply did not reach students because procurement and distribution failed. This is institutional rather than economic in origin.
The reason this taxonomy matters: different types of deprivation require different solutions. And a second-hand book ecosystem – organised, trusted, and accessible – is one of the few tools that addresses multiple types simultaneously.
Read More: Drop-Out Nation: Who Leaves Competitive Exam Preparation and Why
The Learning Crisis Underneath the Book Crisis
Any map of book deprivation in India maps almost perfectly onto a map of learning outcomes. This is not coincidental.
- ASER 2024 found that 76.6% of Class 3 students remained unable to read a Class 2-level text across India’s rural schools.That figure – nearly four in five children – represents a foundational literacy crisis that cannot be explained by poor teaching alone. It also reflects what happens when children begin school without consistent access to reading materials, carry that deficit forward year after year, and eventually encounter a Class 3 textbook having never had meaningful exposure to the material in the previous two classes.
- The PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 – India’s first major post-pandemic national learning assessment – confirmed that the performance gap between the top- and bottom-performing states had widened between 2022 and 2024. States like Kerala and Himachal Pradesh continue to lead, while Jharkhand, Bihar, and several northeastern states persistently lag.
- The correlation between resource access – including books – and learning outcomes is not perfect, but it is consistent. States that invest in putting the right materials in students’ hands, reliably, at the start of each year, show better learning outcomes. States that leave material access to household economics show worse ones. This is not a surprising finding. It is a structurally predictable result.
The States Where Students Struggle Most
Bihar
Bihar records the lowest average annual per-student school expenditure among all states at ₹5,656 – less than half the national average of ₹12,616. This low spend figure partly reflects the dominance of government schools and constrained household incomes, but it also reflects the limited penetration of books, materials, and supplementary resources in a state where 75,509 government schools serve an enormous, dispersed student population.
Bihar’s secondary dropout rate stands at 19.5% – nearly one in five students. The Economic Survey 2024-25 identifies indirect costs – uniforms, transport, books – as a primary driver of dropout at the secondary level, where the cost of a full set of textbooks for Classes 9 and 10 represents a genuine financial barrier for low-income families.
Bihar did show meaningful improvement in ASER 2024 foundational numeracy indicators, suggesting that state-level interventions in early learning are gaining traction. But foundational learning and material access remain two distinct problems, and progress on one does not automatically address the other.
What is being done:
Bihar’s government has expanded NCERT book distribution through government schools and participates in the Samagra Shiksha scheme. The gaps remain substantial, particularly for students transitioning to secondary school where government provisions are thinner and private school book costs apply.
Odisha
Odisha records the highest secondary dropout rate in the country at 25.9% – more than one in four secondary students leave before completing their schooling. The combination of rural poverty, distance to schools, and the accumulating cost of indirect education expenses – books among them – creates a compounding pressure that pushes students, particularly girls, out of the system.
What makes Odisha’s case instructive is what the state government has done in response. In a significant policy move under its 5T initiative, Odisha extended free textbook distribution from government schools to all private and non-aided Odia-medium schools, covering approximately five lakh additional students from Classes 1 to 8. The additional annual cost to the state: ₹9.43 crore – a modest sum relative to the access it creates.
Odisha has also been distributing free Odia-medium textbooks to students in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat – recognising that book access for Odia-speaking students crosses state lines.
The lesson from Odisha: Government willingness to extend free book provision beyond its own schools – treating books as infrastructure rather than family responsibility – is a workable, affordable model. The ₹9.43 crore figure for five lakh students works out to approximately ₹19 per student per year in additional state expenditure. The argument that book access cannot be afforded by the state does not survive contact with this number.
Jharkhand
Jharkhand faces secondary dropout rates in the 15-20% range, with poverty, child labour, and inadequate facilities cited as primary drivers. The state has fewer than 50% of its schools with internet connectivity, and many government schools lack basic infrastructure.
For book access specifically, Jharkhand’s challenge is geographic as much as economic. Large tribal populations in remote areas – where connectivity is poor, bookshops are distant, and government distribution is logistically complex – face book access barriers that are structural rather than simply financial. A student in a tribal block of Jharkhand may want books, have a school to attend, and still not have consistent access to the materials they need for a full academic year.
Jharkhand has 40,402 government schools – a substantial footprint, but one that demands equally substantial logistical capacity to ensure books reach every classroom at the start of every year.
Uttar Pradesh
UP is India’s most complex education story, largely because its scale makes every problem and every improvement enormous in absolute terms. With 134,249 government schools – the highest of any state – UP’s education system serves a student population larger than most countries.
Secondary dropout rates in UP are in the 15-20% range, concentrated in eastern districts where rural poverty is deepest. The state has over 100,000 vacant teaching positions, which affects learning regardless of whether books are present.
But UP is also a state showing measurable improvement. ASER 2024 noted that UP was among the states that surpassed pre-Covid reading and numeracy levels at the foundational stage by at least 2.5 percentage points, a result attributed to state-level implementation of NIPUN Bharat – a foundational literacy and numeracy mission – and focused teacher training programmes.
The book access picture in UP is mixed. Government school students receive NCERT books through state distribution channels. But for the growing number of families enrolling children in private schools – the fastest-growing segment in urban and semi-urban UP – book costs represent a significant and largely unaddressed burden. A family in Lucknow with one child in a mid-range private CBSE school can spend ₹6,000 to ₹10,000 on books alone – in a city where median household income remains constrained.
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Assam and the Northeast
Assam faces high secondary dropout rates, with transitions of approximately 70-80% and secondary retention at 50-60%. Across the northeastern states, the challenges are compounded by difficult terrain, dispersed populations, and the logistical complexity of delivering educational materials to remote areas.
Nagaland and Jammu & Kashmir were specifically identified by ASER 2024 as states needing customised learning recovery plans. For both, learning outcomes are significantly below national averages, and access to consistent teaching materials is part of the underlying problem.
Manipur presents an interesting counterpoint: it has one of the highest per-student school expenditure figures in the country at ₹23,502 – the second highest nationally. That reflects the high prevalence of private school enrolment in the state and the costs families bear. It does not reflect access for all, or quality for all – it reflects what some families are paying, not what all students are receiving.
The States That Are Getting It Right
Understanding deprivation requires equal attention to what is working. Several states have made book access a priority – and the results are visible in both access metrics and learning outcomes.
Kerala
Kerala’s education story is well-documented but worth restating in the context of book access specifically. The state provides textbooks through its government school system with a reliability that is the exception, not the rule, in India. Kerala’s dropout rates are below 1% – the lowest in the country. Its learning outcomes consistently rank at or near the top of national assessments.
In 2025, Kerala’s General Education Minister sought central intervention when Kendriya Vidyalayas in the state were without books four months into the school year – drawing an explicit contrast with state schools, which had distributed books before the academic year even began. That contrast captures the institutional commitment that drives Kerala’s outcomes: books are not a family’s problem to solve. They are the state’s responsibility to deliver.
The Kerala model does not eliminate book deprivation for private school families – those costs remain substantial. But it ensures that no government school student starts the year without materials, and that norm shapes expectations and outcomes at the foundation of the system.
Tamil Nadu
For the 2025-26 academic year, Tamil Nadu distributed 4.3 crore textbooks worth over ₹311 crore, along with 1.3 crore uniforms, 9.6 crore notebooks, and various educational kits to government and government-aided school students. This is not a scheme or a pilot. It is routine, annual, and comprehensive.
Tamil Nadu has also made its state board textbooks freely downloadable in digital form – Tamil and English medium, all classes – without registration or login requirements. The state treats educational content as a public resource rather than a product.
On learning outcomes, Tamil Nadu showed more than 10% improvement in reading skills in ASER 2024 – one of the strongest gains in the country. It is not coincidental that a state which treats books as infrastructure also sees improving reading outcomes.
Tamil Nadu became the first state in India to introduce a comprehensive State Education Policy in 2025 – a document that, among other priorities, emphasises equitable access to learning materials.
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Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh consistently punches above its weight in education outcomes relative to its economic size. It was among the states that surpassed pre-Covid foundational numeracy levels by more than 2.5 percentage points in ASER 2024, a result attributed to both state investment in early learning and relatively reliable material provision in government schools.
Its dropout rates are among the lowest nationally, with transition and retention figures approaching those of Kerala. In the specific context of book access, Himachal Pradesh’s government school distribution system serves a geographically dispersed, largely rural population – a logistical achievement that more populous states struggle to replicate.
The Distribution Failure That No One Expected: NCERT in 2025
Book deprivation is not only a problem of poor states or poor families. In 2025, a distribution failure of a different kind made headlines – one that illustrated how institutional shortcomings can create book deprivation even where resources exist.
In July 2025, Kerala’s General Education Minister V. Sivankutty sought urgent central intervention after students of Classes 5 and 8 in PM Sri Kendriya Vidyalayas – central government schools serving families across India – were still without essential textbooks four months after the academic year began. The books had not been distributed. Teachers were working from online study materials instead. With quarterly examinations approaching, students faced the prospect of being assessed on content they had accessed inconsistently, through screens, rather than through the textbooks the curriculum assumes.
NCERT’s tripling of print capacity – from 5 crore to 15 crore books annually – and its price reduction announcement for 2025 are positive developments. But the KV shortage revealed that production capacity and distribution reliability are separate problems. A book printed in Delhi and not delivered to a school in Thrissur is, from the student’s perspective, a book that does not exist.
The NCERT-Amazon partnership formalised in October 2024 – making original NCERT books available at MRP across nearly 20,000 pin codes – improves urban and semi-urban access. For rural areas with weak delivery infrastructure, the gap remains.
The Invisible Second Layer: Private School Students in All States
The state-by-state picture presented so far focuses largely on government school students – where the data is most comprehensive and the policy interventions most visible. But in every state, including the high-performing ones, there is a second, larger layer of book deprivation that receives almost no policy attention: private school students whose families cannot comfortably absorb annual book costs.
This is not a Bihar problem or a Jharkhand problem. It is a Bengaluru problem, a Pune problem, a Lucknow problem. Private school expenditure per student in urban areas reaches ₹35,798 annually. Textbooks and stationery account for a significant portion of that. And unlike government school students who receive books through distribution, private school families receive a booklist – and are expected to manage the rest themselves.
The second-hand book market is the only structural mechanism that reduces this burden without waiting for policy change. And it is the most underdeveloped part of India’s education access infrastructure – in every state, at every income level above the government school threshold.
What the Numbers Actually Mean: Three State Portraits
A student in rural Jharkhand, Class 7
Priya attends a government middle school an hour from her home by foot. Her school received NCERT books this year, but the Class 7 Social Science book did not arrive – a distribution gap that no one has formally reported. Her teacher has been reading from the textbook aloud. Priya takes notes in a notebook her parents bought at the beginning of the year. She has not held a Social Science textbook in her hands since Class 5.
She is not, in any official record, book-deprived. She is enrolled. Her school received a delivery. The gap is invisible.
A student in urban Nagpur, Class 10
Rohit’s family enrolled him in a private CBSE school because the nearest government school had a poor track record on board results. The Class 10 book requirement came to ₹8,400 – plus ₹3,200 in workbooks that cannot be resold. His father, a warehouse supervisor, took a small advance from his employer.
The books are all present. The cost was painful. The Class 9 books are sitting in a bag in Rohit’s room. His mother asked the school if she could sell them. The school said it was not their concern.
A student in Chennai, preparing for NEET
Divya completed Class 12 from a Tamil Nadu state board school where she received her textbooks free. She is now in her gap year, preparing for NEET. She needs Class 11 and 12 NCERT Biology, Physics, and Chemistry. Her state board books are not aligned with NCERT exactly. She needs the NCERT versions.
New, they would cost approximately ₹2,400. She found a set online through a trusted platform at ₹950 – annotated by a student who had cleared NEET the previous year. The annotations were more useful than the clean margins of a new book would have been.
Three students. Three versions of the same underlying problem. And in the third case, a version of the solution.
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What Is Being Done – And What Still Isn’t
The picture across states is neither uniformly bleak nor uniformly promising. Here is a summary of where action exists and where it doesn’t:
| Category | What exists | What’s missing |
| Government school textbooks | NCERT free/subsidised distribution through Samagra Shiksha | Reliable last-mile delivery in rural areas; accountability for gaps |
| State initiatives | Tamil Nadu (free books + kits), Odisha (extension to private Odia schools), Kerala (state-owned distribution) | Most states have no equivalent programme for private school students |
| NCERT distribution | Expanded print capacity; Amazon partnership | Distribution failures persisted in 2025 for KV students |
| Digital access | NCERT PDFs, Tamil Nadu downloadable books | Not a substitute for physical books; rural internet access remains uneven |
| Second-hand market | Informal WhatsApp groups, raddi shops, local exchanges | No organised, trusted, national-scale platform until recently |
| Policy attention | NEP 2020 mentions affordability | No specific policy addressing book cost burden for private school households |
The last row in that table is the one that matters most for the majority of India’s student population. NEP 2020 is a comprehensive and ambitious policy document. It does not contain a specific mechanism for reducing the annual book cost burden on the 31.9% of students in private schools – those who are neither poor enough for government provisions nor affluent enough to absorb the cost without strain.
That gap is not going to be closed by policy in the near term. It is being closed, incrementally, by platforms that make the second-hand exchange work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which state has the worst book access for students in India?
Book deprivation takes different forms across states. For absolute access – students without books at all – Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha show the most acute challenges, reflected in high secondary dropout rates and low learning outcomes. For affordability-based deprivation – books exist but cost too much – the problem is nationwide and concentrated among private school families in every state. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Himachal Pradesh consistently perform best on material access for government school students.
What is India’s secondary school dropout rate and how are books related?
India’s secondary dropout rate stood at 8.2% nationally in 2024-25, down from 10.9% in previous years. In states like Odisha (25.9%), Bihar (19.5%), and Meghalaya (19.3%), it is dramatically higher. The Economic Survey 2024-25 identifies indirect costs – including books, uniforms, and transport – as a primary driver of secondary dropout, particularly for students from low-income households.
Does the Indian government provide free textbooks to all students?
No. The Right to Education Act mandates free and compulsory education for Classes 1 to 8 in government schools, which includes free textbooks in most states. Government school students largely receive NCERT books through state distribution, though gaps in delivery persist. Private school students – 31.9% of total enrolment – receive no textbook provision from the state. Competitive exam aspirants have no provision at all.
What did Tamil Nadu do differently in 2025 for book access?
Tamil Nadu distributed 4.3 crore textbooks worth ₹311 crore, along with uniforms, notebooks, and educational kits for the 2025-26 academic year, targeting all government and government-aided school students. It also makes state board textbooks freely downloadable online without registration. Tamil Nadu became the first state to introduce a comprehensive State Education Policy in 2025, which includes provisions for learning material equity.
What happened with NCERT textbook shortages in 2025?
In July 2025, students of Classes 5 and 8 in Kendriya Vidyalayas were still without essential textbooks four months into the academic year. Kerala’s General Education Minister sought central intervention, noting that state government schools had distributed books before the academic year began – a contrast that drew attention to the institutional gaps in NCERT’s distribution system. NCERT has since expanded its print capacity and formalised an Amazon India partnership to improve availability.
How does the second-hand book market help with state-wise book deprivation?
A functioning second-hand book market addresses affordability deprivation – the most widespread form of book access failure – by making books available at 40-65% below the cover price. For private school families who receive no government provision, this is the most immediate and practical tool available. BookMandee may organise this exchange by board, class, and subject, making discovery faster and more reliable than informal WhatsApp groups or local raddi shops.
What is the book access situation for competitive exam students (NEET, JEE, UPSC)?
These students fall entirely outside the scope of government provision – even in high-performing states. A NEET aspirant needs the full Class 11 and 12 NCERT set for Biology, Physics, and Chemistry; a UPSC aspirant needs NCERTs from Class 6 to 12 across five or six subjects. New, these sets cost ₹2,500 to ₹6,000. No state government provides these books or subsidises their purchase for non-enrolled exam aspirants. The second-hand market is, for these students, the primary affordability mechanism.
The Map of Deprivation Is Also a Map of Opportunity
Everything documented in this piece – the state-by-state disparities, the distribution failures, the affordability crises in private schools, the learning outcomes that track almost perfectly against access – points to one consistent underlying conclusion.
India’s book access problem is not primarily a supply problem. The books exist. NCERT prints millions of them. Private publishers produce millions more. The issue is circulation: how books move, or fail to move, from where they are to where they are needed.
Tamil Nadu’s government creates one pathway for government school students. Odisha’s 5T initiative creates another. NCERT’s Amazon partnership creates a third. Each of these is real, meaningful, and insufficient on its own.
The pathway that covers the ground none of these reach – private school families across every state, competitive exam students with no government support, families with perfectly good books on one shelf and an urgent need on another – is a well-organised, trusted peer-to-peer exchange.
That map of deprivation does not have to be permanent. The books to close the gap are already in Indian homes. They just need a better route.
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