What a household spends on one school student in an academic year: course fees, textbooks and stationery, uniform, transport and other items. Private coaching is counted separately and left out of this figure. For every INR 100 a Hindu household spends on a student's schooling, a Muslim household spends about INR 71. The reason is not that more Muslim children sit in free government schools: both communities use them at almost the same rate (55.4% and 56.5% of students). Muslim families spend less on fees, books and transport in whichever type of school their children attend.
INR 9,249per school student a year, excl. coaching(2025)
In 2025 a Muslim household spent about INR 9,249 a year on one school child's fees, books, uniform and transport, against INR 12,941 in a Hindu household and INR 12,616 nationally. Both communities lean on free government schools at similar rates, so the shortfall of more than a quarter reflects what families can afford to add on top, not a different choice of school.
How to read the chart
The chart compares yearly per-student school spending across communities for 2017 and 2025; this is money spent, not an outcome, so neither higher nor lower is automatically good. Private coaching is excluded. The Urban vs rural tab shows the gap is widest in towns, where better-off families spend the most.
Why it matters
What a family can put behind each child, the books, a uniform, transport and the occasional extra, shapes how well that child does in the same classroom. Persistent under-spending is one of the quiet ways an income gap turns into an education gap.
Status
Contextgap widening
Muslim INR 9,249 vs Hindu INR 12,941 in 2025, INR 3,692 lower. The gap has held as spending rose across the board, so Muslim families are adding less per child even as every community spends more.
About this measurement
Definition. What a household spends on one school student in an academic year: course fees, textbooks and stationery, uniform, transport and other items. Private coaching is counted separately and left out of this figure. Muslim and Hindu families use free government schools at almost the same rate, so the gap is not about school choice: Muslim households spend less on fees, books and transport in whichever type of school their children attend.
Methodology. Computed from the unit-level microdata of two NSS education rounds: the 75th (Sch 25.2, July 2017 - June 2018, 1.14 lakh households, via MoSPI's original fixed-width TXT distribution; the NADA copy of that round is a proprietary binary, so the build reads the surviving mirror recorded in the repo's provenance notes) and the Comprehensive Modular Survey: Education (CMS:E, NSS 80th round, April - June 2025, 52,085 households, via the NADA CSV distribution). Average expenditure per student currently enrolled at school levels (pre-primary to higher secondary, incl. diploma/certificate up to higher-secondary equivalent) during the current academic year, excluding private coaching in both rounds (the CMS:E published headline construct; the 75th collects coaching as a separate item, so the build drops it for comparability). The 2017-18 estimator reproduces all 27 published anchor cells of NSS Report 585 Statements 19 and 21 within 0.01%; the 2025 estimator reproduces all seven published Report 595 per-student cells within 0.01%.
Neither publication breaks expenditure down by religion. A Muslim school student's year cost INR 9,249 against the all-India INR 12,616 in 2025 (Hindu INR 12,941), down as a share from 2017-18 (INR 5,532 against 7,041 all-India, Hindu 7,050): the Muslim household spends about 72% of what the Hindu household spends per student, where it was 78%. Unlike hospital costs, school choice is not the driver: 55.4% of Muslim students attend government schools against 56.5% of Hindu students (2025), so the gap comes from how much families spend in whichever school they use (fees, books, transport), not from heavier use of free government schools.
The trend line renders dashed: Report 595's own comparability section lists concept revisions vs the 75th round (school-only coverage, anganwadi counted as pre-primary, age universe 3+, itemised coaching), so the step between rounds is indicative. Values are nominal rupees of each round. NSO unit-data rider: religion is self-reported and the survey is stratified for states, not religions, so the split is indicative with no sub-state estimates.