Unsung contribution of India’s private chain schools
Against the depressing backdrop of privately promoted schools overwhelmingly preferred by the middle class including low income households, being persecuted countrywide, a positive development is the growth of private chain schools – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen Despite the overwhelming majority of post-independence India’s 300 million-strong middle class availing privately provided English-medium school education, its attitude towards private initiatives in education is schizophrenic. On the one hand, upwardly mobile middle class households vote en masse for private education — especially pre-primary-class XII education — with their feet and wallets. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie’s addiction to unmerited subsidies — in effect a transfer of resources from the poor to the relatively rich — readily dispensed by India’s profligate politicians and the neta-babu brotherhood which has dominated and crippled the national development effort — makes this relatively flourishing class resentful about paying the market price of good quality education. Although few middle class households choose to send their children to government schools even though they provide free-of-charge education, they are readily in the vanguard of protests against private schools raising their rising tuition fees. They want — demand — first world private education at third world prices. This sustained demand of the country’s powerful and influential middle class for private education at rock-bottom prices has prompted almost all state governments to enact legislation to cap school fees, particularly annual fee hikes that are inevitable within an economy in which double-digit inflation is normative. Largely ignorant of the reality that private education in contemporary India is cheaper than in any other country worldwide, the Indian bourgeoisie has persuaded Parliament, state governments and even the learned judges of the upper judiciary to enact and uphold legislation which severely circumscribes the fundamental right of private citizens to engage in the business of education provision at all levels. Indeed since the 1970s when the country’s hyper-socialist prime minister Indira Gandhi packed the Supreme Court with ideologically “committed” judges, in numerous convoluted judgements, the apex court has ruled that privately provided school and higher education is necessarily a philanthropic activity and has repeatedly deplored the “commercialisation of education”, a phrase that’s become the mantra of populist politicians, the establishment, business-illiterate academics, and jholawalas who dominate the national development discourse. The logic of education being permitted as a legitimate business activity on a par with provision of food, shelter and clothing, has eluded — and continues to elude — the establishment, including learned justices of free India’s much-acclaimed independent judiciary. In the historic Union budget of July 1991, the Indian economy was substantially liberalised and deregulated. And in 2002 in a historic judgement in T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs. Union of India & Ors, delivered by a full 11-judge bench, the Supreme Court (by a thin majority) recognised the fundamental right of all citizens to establish and administer education institutions of their choice as a “vocation”. The majority upheld the right of private professional education institutions to devise their own admission processes subject to admitting meritorious students in…
Expert Comment: Positives of draft NEP 2019
Should India welcome foreign universities and colleges? Against the backdrop of only two of 21st century India’s 39,000 colleges and 1,241 universities ranked among the global Top 200 in the WUR (World University Rankings) of the London-based QS and Times Higher Education, this is a critical question for the country’s youth because they need — indeed they are entitled to — world-class education, high-quality faculty and latest education technologies. The question brings to mind the debate between Gandhiji and Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi argued that we should be rooted in our culture and be wary of outsiders and their influence. As the debate was conducted through various magazines and publications, Gandhi, as he did so often, accommodated the poet’s views without altering his fundamental belief in the uniqueness of Indian culture and civilisation. In a famous quote, Gandhi revised his opinion. “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any,” he said. The draft National Education Policy, 2019 presented to Union HRD minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal on May 31, attempts to strike a balance between the foundations of Indian civilization and the fundamentals of the newly emerged ‘flat world’. The draft seems to be far more open than the establishment has been in the past towards foreign colleges and universities. Three key proposals in the Kasturirangan Committee’s draft NEP offer the hope that this could be education’s liberalisation moment, as 1991 was for the Indian economy. Of course some proposals of the committee are questionable, but let’s begin with the positives. The first proposal that represents a titanic paradigm shift in the governance of education in post-independence India is separation of the roles and functions of the education establishment at the Centre and in the states. Currently all functions related to education are discharged by education ministries under the command of a secretary. The ministry, with its wholly controlled institutions (UGC, AICTE, NCTE etc), is policymaker, regulator, financier of infrastructure and personnel, assessor of quality and compliance, adjudicator of disputes between institutions and also service provider which runs government schools and colleges. All these diverse functions are performed under the supervision of the education secretary. Quite obviously, a single entity cannot possibly perform all these functions effectively; it militates against the basic idea of core competency. Therefore the draft NEP recommends several agencies to focus on their core competencies and functions. Under the current system, there is an inherent conflict of interest between being a service provider on the one hand running government schools, and being the regulator and assessor of quality on the other. The draft NEP is in tune with the global movement towards ‘agencification’. Placing separate agencies in charge of distinct functions with responsibilities and power is the norm in developed OECD countries. For instance, the UK has 17 different…