To compile the league tables of India’s Top 300 budget private schools, C fore field researchers interviewed 2,458 BPS teachers and SEC (socio-economic category) C, D and E parents with children enrolled in budget schools countrywide. They perceptually rated BPS in their states and cities on 11 parameters of school education excellence. Shocking, but true. Although India’s unique budget private, aka affordable, schools which number an estimated 400,000 are schooling a staggering 60 million children, they are neither respected nor tolerated by academia and the establishment. Within the upper middle class — which has hogged almost all the gains of post-independence India’s feeble national development effort — the pavlovian reaction to budget private schools (BPS) is loathing and contempt. In the Nehruvian socialism lexicon, all private entrepreneurs — especially in education — are exploiters hellbent on deriving maximum profit from schooling children of the gullible poor. This dominant middle class sentiment has been sanctified by the country’s judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly deplored “commercialisation of education” while turning a judicial blind eye to the rampant commercialisation of the country’s crumbling legal system whose lethargy and chronic delays cost the Indian economy an estimated 2 percent of GDP growth annually. The aversion of academia and establishment towards BPS is evidenced by s.19 of the landmark Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Under this section, all private schools are obliged to adhere to stringent infrastructure norms — bathrooms, kitchen, store-room, playground and teacher-pupil ratio — on pain of punitive fines and forceful closure. However, schools promoted and/or managed by the Central, state and local governments are exempt from the provisions of s.19 and the infrastructure norms detailed in a Schedule of the RTE Act. Quite clearly, the objective of s.19 is to stifle and/or eliminate BPS which provide children of the lower middle and working classes an alternative to dysfunctional government schools characterised by English language aversion and pathetic learning outcomes. According to the Delhi-based National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA), a representative body of BPS which claims a membership of 55,000, an estimated 23,000 low-priced schools across the country have already shut down because of constant harassment by inspectors of education ministries in several states, and another 20,000 are under threat of forcible closure for non-adherence to s.19 norms. The hostility of government officials at the Centre, and especially in the states towards BPS, is not born out of their child centrism, but because of increasing disgust among parents and children with dilapidated infrastructure, chronic teacher truancy, English learning aversion and rock-bottom learning outcomes for which government primaries/elementaries have become notorious. They are voting with their feet and wallets and fleeing to BPS countrywide. Therefore, the prime purpose of inserting s.19 in the RTE Act was to get rid of the competition to government schools. In EducationWorld, your editors believe in free markets and the fundamental right of parents to choose schools they believe are best for their children, and have always taken a…
