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Most of the Vidya Bharati schools are affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education or their local State Boards. In 2019, the formal schools had a total strength of more than 34 lakh (3.4 million) students.
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As of 2019, there were 12,828 formal schools and 11,353 informal schools. As of March 2002, it had 17,396 schools, 22 lakh (2.2 million) students, over 93,000 teachers, 15 teacher training colleges, 12 degree colleges and 7 vocational and training institutions. This expansion was facilitated by the growing demand for education in India and the disaffection with the state school system. Organisation īy the early 1990s, the network had grown to 5,000 schools and by 2003, to about 14,000 schools with 17 lakh (1.7 million) pupils. Incidentally, Vidya Bharati used to have an associated National Academic Council with educationists, which enjoyed the trust of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). This coincided with the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (political arm of RSS) winning the national elections, as a member of the Janata Party. In 1977-78, an all-India apex body, Vidya Bharati was set up to coordinate the activities between these state committees and was headquartered in Delhi. Such committees were set up in Delhi, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Accordingly, Shishu Shiksha Prabandak Samiti, was set up to coordinate activities between these schools at the state level. The Saraswati Shishu Mandir model was quickly replicated across several locations and as the number of schools increased, there arose the need of a definite management structure. After the ban was lifted, the first Saraswati Shishu Mandir brand school was established in Gorakhpur in 1952, by Nanaji Deshmukh. But, the ban on RSS in 1948 put a damper on the spread of the Gita school model. Golwalkar established its first Gita school at Kurukshetra in 1946.