Weight of a school bag: India’s children are still bearing a heavy burden, literally

Stand outside almost any school at opening or closing time and a familiar sight unfolds: small children dwarfed by oversized backpacks, some seemingly carrying more than their young shoulders can bear.

It would be one thing if India had never recognised the problem. But we have. It has been studied, debated and translated into a national policy that even sets out how much a child should reasonably be expected to carry. The real question, then, is not whether we know the burden exists. It is why so many children are still carrying it.

India has around 24.72 crore school students across roughly 14.67 lakh schools. Even a seemingly mundane question such as backpack weight, therefore, becomes an issue of enormous scale.

During the exercise that led to the School Bag Policy, 2020, an overwhelming majority of responding parents said a heavy school bag was a serious problem for their child. The survey also showed how quickly the kilos accumulate. Textbooks could contribute anything from 500 grams to 3.5 kg, notebooks another 200 grams to 2.5 kg. Lunch boxes, water bottles and the empty bag itself add still more.

This is why calling it a ‘bag problem’ is slightly misleading. The bag is merely the container. The real weight is created by decisions: how many subjects are taught on a day, how many notebooks each subject requires, whether supplementary books are prescribed, whether drinking water is readily available, whether books can remain in school, and whether every lesson necessarily requires a textbook to travel between home and classroom.

There is also a health case for being sensible, although we should resist exaggerating it. Singapore’s public-health guidance similarly recommends keeping school bags around 10-15 per cent. India’s own policy also calls for school bags themselves to be lightweight and ergonomically designed. That is important because reducing the burden is not simply about taking books out of a bag.

We have an implementation problem

A private member’s Children School Bags (Limitation on Weight) Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2006. It proposed limits on bag weight and storage facilities in schools, but the Bill eventually lapsed. More than a decade later, the Madras High Court directed the Centre to formulate a national policy. An expert group was constituted, and the Ministry of Education issued the School Bag Policy in November 2020 for implementation by States and Union Territories. Its recommendations are remarkably practical.

The 2018 judgment in M Purushothaman v Union of India was, in fact, the principal judicial impetus behind the national policy. The Madras High Court asked the Union Government to frame a policy broadly on the models already being followed in Telangana and Maharashtra, ensure its adoption by all States and Union Territories, constitute special or flying squads for inspections, prevent schools from prescribing unnecessary books, and regulate subjects and homework in accordance with NCERT and National Curriculum Framework norms. In many respects, these directions anticipated what subsequently became the core of the School Bag Policy, 2020.

The judiciary returned to the issue in Johny Cyriac v MHRD before the Kerala High Court in 2020. That judgment reinforced the measures already underway, emphasising that they needed to be implemented “in letter and spirit” and backed by periodic inspections. Importantly, it also located excessive school burden within the wider framework of child rights and welfare, including Articles 21 and 39(e) and (f) of the Constitution.

The two interventions are worth reading together. The Madras High Court supplied the principal push towards a national framework; the Kerala High Court underlined that having a framework on paper would mean little without effective implementation and monitoring.

As per the 2020 policy, there should be no school bags for pre-primary children. From Class I onwards, the suggested ceiling is approximately 10 per cent of the child’s body weight. So, depending on the child’s weight, the indicative range is about 1.6-2.2 kg for Classes I-II, rising progressively through the senior classes. Schools are expected to weigh bags periodically, rationalise textbooks and notebooks, and design timetables that reduce the number of materials travelling each day.

The policy goes further. It recommends no homework for Classes I-II; up to two hours a week for Classes III-V; around an hour a day for Classes VI-VIII; and up to two hours daily thereafter. Under the larger NEP framework, students in Grades VI-VIII are also meant to experience a 10-day ‘bagless’ period involving vocational and experiential learning. Dedicated guidelines for these bagless days were launched by the Education Ministry in 2024. What India needs is the less glamorous part of policymaking: implementation.

West Bengal issued fresh guidelines in May this year, setting the 10 per cent limit, requiring schools to display permissible weights and use weighing machines regularly. Chandigarh has gone a step further administratively: a five-member committee has been constituted to conduct quarterly inspections across government, aided and recognised private schools.

Maharashtra showed much earlier that monitoring can be done at scale. In 2016, the State informed the Bombay High Court that 2,463 officials had inspected 17,235 schools and checked 3,94,299 bags. It reported compliance of 87.45 per cent. What we need is relatively clear: put a weighing scale in every school, display the permissible range where parents and children can see it, conduct random checks, include one simple school-bag compliance measure within existing reporting systems, and ask schools to tell pupils in advance which books are actually required the next day. Small administrative changes can remove surprisingly large amounts of weight.

There should also be clear consequences for repeated non-compliance. At present, the larger challenge is that the School Bag Policy remains substantially an advisory framework. Stronger statutory or regulatory backing, accompanied by proportionate penalties or other regulatory action where schools repeatedly disregard the norms, would help ensure that implementation does not depend entirely on the enthusiasm of individual States, districts or school administrations.

The school bag can become a useful test of whether the philosophy of the National Education Policy is actually reaching the classroom. India has already decided what a reasonable school bag should weigh. Perhaps it is now time to weigh something else: how seriously we take our own policy.

The writer is a social activist working in the fields of welfare, international cultural cooperation, and the promotion and preservation of Indian arts, languages and culture; Views presented are personal.