The Great Indian Private Education Sector

Despite an inhospitable — indeed hostile — environment, a large and growing community of determined education entrepreneurs have run the gauntlet of licence-permit-quota raj in education, to promote and establish high-quality preschools, K-12 schools, vocational education and training institutes, higher education institutions and NGOs. 

In the latest league table of the london-based qs world university Rankings 2011 published in September, Delhi University (DU) — routinely ranked India’s top university in the annual league tables ofIndia Today, Outlook and several business publications — is ranked No.398. In the Times Higher Education(THE) World University Rankings 2011-12 league table published last month, it is unranked.

Yet the shameful international reputation of DU — which rules the roost of Indian academia with some of its affiliated colleges stipulating 100 percent as their admission cut-offs — has caused hardly a ripple in the sleepy bowers of Indian academia or in the Union HRD ministry which administers this generously-funded Central university. The Union and state governments and Indian society in general seem unconcerned that despite ancient India boasting some of the world’s first universities in Nalanda and Taxila, and its modern universities of Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras (Chennai) established over 150 years ago and Delhi University in 1922, Asia’s more recently promoted varsities in China, South Korea, Hong Kong and several other countries are leaps ahead of them in the QS and THE league tables.

The plain unvarnished truth is that a pernicious malaise exhibiting all the symptoms of oriental inertia and fatalism has infected public education in India at every level — preschool, primary, secondary and tertiary. If allowed to fester, it is certain to nullify 21st century India’s much-trumpeted demographic advantage of hosting the world’s largest 450 million-strong population of children and youth.

Yet this grim prediction (asserted for over a decade by EducationWorld which with this issue ‘celebrates’ — for want of a better word — its 12th anni-versary year), needs qualification. The Great Indian Education Failure — 53 percent of children who enroll in primary education don’t enter secondary school; an estimated 80-100 million children are out of school; 46.6 percent of class V  children in rural primaries can’t comprehend class II textbooks and 64 percent can’t do elementary maths; a mere 40 million children are in secondary or higher secondary educa-tion; only 11 percent of youth in the age group 17-24 are in higher education, and 75 percent of engineering graduates and 85 percent of arts, science and  commerce graduates are unemployable in multinational companies adhering to global business norms and practices — is a damning indictment of the Central and state governments which own and manage 90 percent of the country’s primary schools, and the great majority of India’s 533 universities and 31,000 colleges.

On the other hand, within India’s smaller private education sector, this country — which is only 74 percent literate — boasts highly-reputed private primary-secon-dary schools such as Woodstock, Doon School, Indus International, St. Paul’s Darjeeling, Lawrence, Sanawar, Bishop Cotton, Shimla and Daly College, Indore which attract students from around the world. Similarly, in higher education a handful of privately-promoted universities, notably Manipal University and Vellore Institute of Technology, have attracted medical and engineering students from South-east Asian and African countries for several decades. These among other private education institutions have survived and even flourished despite the best efforts of post-independence India’s ubiq-uitous control-and-command neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) klepto-cracy, which over 64 years since independence, has manoeuvred a stranglehold over Indian education.

Indeed it’s arguable that post-independence India’s private sector schools and colleges have made a contribution out of all proportion to their number to educate and train millions of children and youth country-wide, who have led post-liberalisation (1991) India’s miraculous transformation into one of the contemporary world’s fast-track economies growing at over 8 percent per year. The plain truth obfus-cated by the government establishment and politics-obsessed mainstream media is that it’s the country’s 80,000 (290,000 according to the Union HRD ministry which computes primary, secondary and higher sections within one school separately) private aided and unaided schools; 110 private (deemed) universities; 130 private arts, science and commerce colleges; 950 privately-promoted B-schools; IT (information technology) skills training companies such as NIIT and Aptech; an estimated 100,000 exams coaching schools and 5,900 privately-promoted VET (vocational education and train-ing) schools, which are keeping the wheels of Indian industry turning. Private enterprises are mainly educating, training and supplying near-ready professionals and skilled workers within an economy which  has over 40 million registered educated unem-ployed, even as paradoxically it is experiencing a grave shortage of skilled personnel in all sectors.

“There’s no doubt that India’s private education institutions have made a great, largely unsung contribution to national growth and development. Indeed if there wasn’t a parallel alternative private education system to bridge the skills gap of Indian industry, we would never have experienced the 7-8 percent economic growth rate of the past two decades. Laudable private initiatives and contributions in Indian education don’t get their due, and there’s no denying that private education entrepreneurs and educat-ionists receive step-sisterly treatment from the Central and state governments. There’s urgent need for a change in the government mindset towards private initiatives in education because the State just doesn’t have the resources to build significant capacity and/or improve the quality of education dispensed in the country’s schools and colleges,” says Shobha Mishra Ghosh, the Delhi-based  director of education and health at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), whose member companies are experiencing acute and worsening shortages of adequately trained and skilled personnel, which the government-dominated higher education system in particular, seems unable to meet.
Although Left academics and intellectuals who dominate India’s academic discourse are in denial, it’s abundantly clear that India’s middle class has almost completely aband-oned the Central, especially state government-run primary-secondary school system. Currently, the country’s 80,000 private aided and unaided schools which constitute a mere 7 percent of India’s 1.26 million K-12 institutions, host 40 percent of the country’s school-going population — damning proof that all who can afford private schooling are availing it. Dr. James Tooley, professor of education at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in his well-researched book A Beautiful Tree (Penguin, 2009), recounts that learning outcomes in free-of-charge state primaries are so abysmal and teacher absenteeism and negligence so rife, that even the poorest households prefer to enroll their children in privately-run, fees-levying neighbour-hood slum schools. According to estimates of the Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Civil Society, the number of such budget private primaries run by dedicated education entrepreneurs has burgeoned to 450,000 with an aggregate enrolment of 36 million children, despite tuition-free government primaries offering additional incentives such as free mid-day meals, uniforms and textbooks.



"There’s no doubt in my mind that privately promoted and managed institutions are the saving grace of India’s education system. Historically, India’s private aided schools — espe-cially missionary schools which receive subsidies from state governments — were the country’s first PPP (public-private partnership) education institu-tions which created India’s middle class. Moreover, after liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991 when the country’s annual GDP growth rate doubled, it was private enterprises such as NIIT, Aptech, and private engineering colleges which stepped up to the plate to meet the huge manpower requirements of Indian industry for trained professi-onals, especially of the IT industry. Private education institutions, which deliver markedly better learning outcomes, have played — and continue to play — a major role in India’s economic development effort and deserve every encouragement,” says Dr. Parth Shah, promoter-president of the Centre for Civil Society, which introduced the country’s first highly successful education vouchers scheme for 400 slum children in Delhi on a pilot basis last year. “The voucher scheme funds students, not schools, prompting school managements to compete to attract students. It needs to be rolled out nationally,” adds Shah.
Confronted with the phenomenon of mass and accelerating flight from state and local government schools in particular, the response of the  establishment has been to erect road-blocks for private initiatives in education and to crack down on private budget schools. Right across the country, promotion of private education institu-tions is a lengthy and cumbersome process requiring NOCs (no-objection certificates) from a host of state and local government authorities, and licences from bureaucrats invested with wide discretionary powers. Nor is it a secret that rents and speed money are extracted at every turn by cynical bureaucrats lodged in the education departments of all state and local governments, making it very difficult for all except the most determined or those with the right ‘contacts’, to promote greenfield institutions.
And with private budget schools mushrooming in urban slums offering uncomfortable competition to local government schools, the former are likely to be shut down en masse following enactment of the Right to Free & Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act). Under s.19 of the Act, all private schools are obliged to adhere to strict infrastructure standards in a Schedule specifying norms for private schools. Among the norms imposed are minimum teacher-pupil ratios; one classroom for every teacher; all-weather building with drinking water; separate toilets for boys and girls; kitchen for mid-day meals; library and playground; and sports equipment. Curiously, these norms are not applicable to government schools.
Quite patently, instead of focusing upon raising teaching-learning stand-ards and improving the crumbling infrastructure of the country’s 1.25 million government primaries charact-erised by multi-grade classrooms, lack of electricity, drinking water and toilets, the intent of the RTE Act authors is to restrict the growth of private institutions and in particular, ease out low-priced budget schools. Although a three-year time frame is given to budget schools to comply with the norms specified in the Schedule, no provision has yet been made for grants or loans to enable them to upgrade their institutions to the specified norms.
Nevertheless despite the inhospitable — indeed hostile — environment designed by the nation’s myopic neta-babu kleptocracy bent upon extracting rents and exactions from the failed government-dominated educat-ion system, a large and growing comm-unity of determined education entrepreneurs or edupreneurs, driven by the spirit of enlightened self-interest, are running the gauntlet of licence-permit-quota raj which has smoothly migrated from industry to education, to promote and establish high-quality preschools, K-12 schools, vocational education and training institutes, higher education institutions and NGOs, to raise education standards across the board.


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