The small minority of India’s top-rung legacy boarding and new genre international schools are on a par with the best private schools in the West. But the majority of secondaries are under-developed by global standards THE GLARING qualitative gap which is evident between post-independence India’s private and government preschools and primaries, is unbridged in secondary education, and arguably exacerbated. As indicated previously, 53 percent of the 230 million children enrolled in primary schools countrywide, especially in government schools don’t complete elementary (class VIII) education — undoubtedly the greatest wastage of human capital in any nation-state worldwide. Subsequently, another half of the children who enter secondary education fail to complete high school, with the result that only 51 million were enrolled in senior secondary (class IX-X) and higher secondary (classes XI-XII) education according to HRD ministry statistics (2011). Again only half this cohort (26.7 million) enters tertiary education, according to data cited by Dr Laveesh Bhandari, an alum of Boston University and founder-director of the Delhi-based Indicus Analytics, an economics research firm, in a recent compendium titled Getting India Back on Track — An Action Agenda for Reform (Random House, 2014). According to Bhandari, a major infirmity of Indian education is a lack of adequate capacity-building in secondary education with only 200,000 intermediate/senior/higher secondary schools operational countrywide and subject to a “poorly designed” regulatory system. “The issue, therefore, is more about choice — oversight by the right stakeholders, with the power to replace teachers, a voice in determining course content, the monitoring and enforcement of quality, and regulation of schools — than it is about public versus private. What is most important is that this choice is provided to students and the community (and not the bureaucrats) in all domains of learning — schools, teachers and curriculum,” writes Bhandari. The plain reality of the 67-year-old self-styled socialist India is that only households which can afford to pay, have the luxury of school choice. At the top of the hierarchy are India’s vintage private British-style primary-secondary boarding schools, some established 200 years ago, where children of the traditional elites are schooled (tuition fees: Rs.1.5-5 lakh per year), and new genre of day-cum-residential international schools affiliated with offshore examination boards (IBO, CIE, AP) with five-star amenities favoured by the country’s new rich (Rs.5-8 lakh). Next in the pecking order are unaided (financially independent) mostly day schools which dominate secondary and higher secondary education (estimated number: 80,000; Rs.30,000-100,000), followed by government-aided private schools in which staff salaries are paid by the state government in exchange for government-approved syllabuses, certification and tuition fees. Next in the hierarchy are Central, state and local government secondary and higher secondaries (estimated number: 60,000). Unsurprisingly, Central government schools (Kendriya Vidyalayas, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas) affiliated with the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and established mainly to educate the children of top-level transferable bureaucrats, are heavily subsidised and tend to be on a par with the best-unaided schools, indicating that the bureaucracy looks after its own interests very well. The…
