On 5th August, in a written reply to a question from Kirron Kher (she raised the issue of schools shutting down in the last session of the parliament too but the ministry did not have much information), Minister of Human Resources Development, Smriti Irani said that a total of 2173 schools have so far been closed down across India for failing to fulfill input criteria (ie. get recognized) stipulated by the Right to Education Act (RTE) - 1170 in Punjab, 4 in Himachal, 998 in Madhya Pradesh and one in Puducherry. Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Odisha, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Chandigarh, Delhi and Lakshadweep have reported that no school has been closed, which is not true as I will explain later. The rest of the states have not responded to MHRD's request for the data. Since the RTE allows the recognition criteria to be fixed by the states, these are basically schools shut down by the state governments enforcing the RTE.