The self-evident proposition that the quality of education dispensed in the country’s schools is dependent on the entry of highly-educated and well-trained teachers, has dawned upon Indian society and the establishment. Suddenly remuneration packages are swelling across the board in Indian education Dilip Thakore

For India’s estimated 9 million teachers’ community, September 5, designated Teachers Day in 1962 to commemorate the birthday of scholar-statesman Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (King George V Chair of mental and moral science at the University of Calcutta (1921-1932) and Spalding professor of eastern religion and ethics at University of Oxford (1936-1952)) who served as the Indian Republic’s first vice president and later president (1962-67), came and went with perfunctory celebrations to which this short-changed community has become accustomed. On the day, children countrywide expressed thanks and gratitude to their tutors with modest classroom gaiety, and newspapers devoted some column inches lauding their contributions to the national development effort.

Yet lip service and ritual gratitude expressed by politicians, government officials and the parents’ community aside, the ground reality is that although they discharge the vital duty of educating the country’s future leaders and critical decision-makers, India’s teachers — particularly in 1.40 million K-12 schools nationwide with an aggregate enrolment of 230 million children at the start of every academic year (almost 200 million drop out at various stages of the education continuum) — are under-paid, unappreciated and over-worked.

Within India’s 300 million-strong middle class, it’s rare for an aspirational upwardly-mobile household to encourage children to prepare for a career in academia, especially in K-12 education because salaries are so modest it’s almost impossible to maintain a middle class household on a teacher’s salary. Among the career counsellors’ community, it’s a wry joke that only those who cannot land a job in any other white collar vocation — law, engineering, medicine, government, business etc — enter the teaching profession. 

However, there are straws in the wind that indicate this iniquitous situation is changing. The self-evident proposition that the quality of education dispensed in the country’s schools — and institutions of higher education — is dependent upon the entry and retention of highly-educated and well-trained teachers in the profession, is beginning to sink into slow-to-learn Indian society and the establishment. Suddenly, salaries and remuneration packages are swelling across the board in India’s under-performing schools, colleges and universities which languish at the bottom of all international comparative league tables. To its credit, the first initiative to upgrade the status of the teachers’ community was taken by the Union government’s Sixth Pay Commission (SPC, 2008) which sharply raised the pay-scales of teachers in Central government schools and higher education institutions by 100 percent with retrospective effect from 2006, forcing state government institutions and top-ranked private schools and colleges to follow suit. Consequently, SPC salaries prescribed for primary teachers in Delhi at Rs.23,000-30,000 per month and  became the benchmark for government and private schools countrywide, resulting in a sharp increase in teachers’ pay in education institutions across the board.

“There’s no doubt that over the past five years, teachers pay in private schools has improved greatly. With the SPC having more than doubled the pay of primary, teaching graduate and postgraduate teachers, and the multiplication of high-end new and international schools with expat principals and highly-paid faculty, all private schools have had to revise pay packages to retain their experienced teachers. Currently, the top schools ranked by EducationWorld are paying primary day school teachers Rs.25-30,000 per month, trained graduate teachers in middle school Rs.30-40,000 and senior school teachers Rs.40-80,000.

Although these salaries are not on a par with corporate pay scales, they represent a 100 percent jump over the situation five years ago. In legacy and international boarding schools these salaries are supplemented by very generous perks including housing, food and free education for children. And for private school principals, Rs.1 lakh plus free full-board housing, chauffeur-driven car, medical, insurance etc is the minimum. Certainly, teaching has become a highly attractive profession during the past five years, especially if long holidays and emotional satisfaction are also evaluated,” says Anju Dhawan, a science alumna of Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak, former teacher and currently promoter-proprietor of the Delhi-based SMS Consultants (estb. 2003). A firm with a clientele comprising 400 education institutions, SMS has placed over 4,000 principals, vice principals/deans and teachers countrywide during the past 12 years. 

Brighter horizons for school teachers are also forecast by Lt. Gen (Retd.) Arjun Ray, managing trustee of the Bengaluru (aka Bangalore)-based Indus Trust (estb. 2001). Since the dawn of the new millennium, the trust has promoted three Indus International state-of-the-art, International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO), Geneva- affiliated day-cum-boarding schools in Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad (all ranked among the Top 10 in the EW India School Rankings 2015) which employ 335 of the country’s most well-remunerated teachers.

“The prospects of teaching professionals have substantially improved not only financially, but also by way of opportunities. A whole range of possibilities in digital portals, consultancy, NGOs and even corporates involved with education has become available to professionally-qualified teachers. Financially, during the past five years teachers’ pay in international schools has increased by 30-40 percent, and in legacy boarding schools by over 50 percent. For principals of international and top-ranked boarding schools, annual pay packages of Rs.50 lakh and Rs.35 lakh plus the full range of perquisites, including free education for children — a very valuable perk — are the new norms. If you take into consideration the fact that teachers work only 220 days per year, salaries in the country’s best schools are now on a par with corporate pay packages,” says Ray.

Gen. Ray’s optimism about the country’s star graduates entering K-12 education has prompted the Indus Trust to promote the Indus Training and Research Institute (ITARI), sited on the 28-acre campus of Indus International School (IIS), Bengaluru.

Established in 2009, the institute annually selects 15 from among the brightest and best college graduates, and prepares them to teach in the three Indus schools, paying them a stipend of Rs.10,000 per month plus transport and meals, with the assurance of placement (Rs.35,000) at the end of a year’s training.

Moreover in a parallel stream, ITARI admits 35-40 graduates and professionals into its intensive 12-month Postgraduate Diploma in International Education (PGDIE) programme, charging a tuition fee of Rs.1.5-2 lakh. “ITARI, which provides world-class teacher education in collaboration with Birmingham City University, UK, attracts a mix of trainees. Our current batch of 35 includes a film director, a school promoter and a foreign teacher. Last year there was a great rush to recruit ITARI graduates, all of whom were snapped up by international schools at Rs.55-60,000 plus perks per month,” says Ray.

Certainly the mushroom growth of new-genre international schools offering globally benchmarked infrastructure, avant garde pedagogies and remuneration which can support the lifestyles of the new post-liberalisation middle class, has revived public interest in teaching as a career choice. Gina Mistry, a child psychology graduate of Mumbai University and former customer support manager at the computer hardware major Dell Corp, signed up and completed the PGDIE progamme of ITARI in 2013, and currently teaches the IB PYP (primary years programme) at IIS, Bengaluru.

“The teacher’s role has changed dramatically in recent years, especially in international schools. With two sons studying in IIS, Bangalore, I became involved and interested in the way they were learning. When I found that pay scales are comparable with industry, and there are career advancement opportunities in school education, I enroled in the institute’s training programme. ITARI has excellent teacher educators and makes us ready to teach while also developing leadership skills. I believe I have a good future in my new profession,” says Mistry.

Likewise Vignesh Rao, an alum of IIS, Bengaluru and the highly-ranked Vellore Institute of Technology, gave up a promising career with Volvo India, a subsidiary of the Swedish megacorp which manufactures cars, omnibuses and trucks, to sign up for teacher training at ITARI in July. “The arrival of international schools has created a multi-disciplinary teaching revolution in India which offers exciting continuous learning opportunities for teachers as well as students. I believe my human resources management experience in Volvo combined with my training in ITARI will equip me to innovate and re-engineer K-12 education,” says Rao.

This resurgence of interest which is opening doors for the best and brightest college and university graduates to teach in schools (and also colleges/universities), is a welcome and overdue development. Inexplicably, in the blissful dawn after freedom from British rule in 1947, although post-independence India (ill-advisedly) adopted the centrally-planned model of socio-economic development on the premise that the Planning Commission would ensure balanced growth in all sectors of the economy, education — especially primary education which is globally acknowledged as the foundation of national development — received scant attention in the Nehruvian era (1947-64). National (Centre plus states) expenditure on education averaged a mere 3.5 percent of GDP as tax revenues and people’s savings were poured into non-starter public sector enterprises and the defence services.

Even subsequently, despite the high-powered Kothari Commission (1966) urgently recommending that annual expenditure on education be raised to 6 percent of GDP, during the next two decades (1966-84) when Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv (1985-89) dominated national politics, the nation-building recommendations of the Kothari Commission were ignored.

Nor was the disdain for primary-secondary education restricted to the myopic leaders of the Nehru dynasty. None of their successors paid much heed to the Kothari Commission report either, and the average annual outlay for education (Centre plus states) has languished at 3-3.5 percent of GDP for the past 68 years, even as the global average is over 5 percent and developed OECD countries routinely spend 7-10 percent of their substantially greater GDP on education.

The sustained neglect of education has not only plunged high-potential India into the bottom ranks of the UNDP’s annual Human Development Report in which it is currently ranked #136 among 186 countries, it has also inflicted heavy consequential damage in several sectors of the economy and stalled the national development effort.

For a start, the conspicuous failure to universalise acceptable quality primary (and early childhood) education and the abysmal learning outcomes of the country’s 1.20 million government primaries, are prime factors behind tripling of the country’s population in the past six decades. Instead of ensuring universal primary-secondary education which stabilised population growth in all developed countries, in the 1960s the Nehru government introduced the world’s first official birth control programme which ended in disaster during the 19-month internal state of Emergency (1975-77) declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi.

Moreover the pathetic quality of education in dysfunctional government primaries for over six decades has adversely affected productivity across all sectors of the economy. In Indian agriculture, which employs two-thirds of the population, wheat, rice and food grain yields are half those of China and one-fourth of developed nations such as the UK, USA and Spain. Likewise the productivity of Indian shopfloor workers in industry is 10-20 percent of labour in OECD countries.

Runaway population growth — deftly transformed into a “demographic dividend” by the country’s self-serving politicians and lackey academics — and rock-bottom productivity in agriculture and public sector enterprises promoted at vast expense to sub-serve the ill-informed ideological predilections of the Nehru dynasty and the Congress party, are not the only consequences of the continuous and unprotested neglect of public education. Insufficient attention to syllabus formulation and curriculum development in state government schools (and the foolish reluctance to teach English, the link language of the Indian Union) has resulted in an entire generation of post-independence India’s children coming of age without the strong ethical and moral foundations which are the prerequisite of good citizenship.

These lacunae combined with the adoption of a socialist ideology-driven licence-permit-quota regimen of economic development, investing vast discretionary powers in politicians and the bureaucracy, transformed a highly idealistic population into the contemporary world’s most corrupt societies, ranked #85 among 175 nations on the graft index of the Berlin-based

Transparency International, and #142 on the transnational Ease of Doing Business index of the World Bank. 
When the nation attained independence in 1947, although the majority population was illiterate because of colonial neglect, the subcontinent boasted a substantial number of government schools dispensing high-quality primary-secondary education, and an excellent private schools system with some day and boarding schools almost a century old. Arguably, newly-independent India also had the best higher education system in Asia.

Since then, the government primary school system — barring 2,000 Central government-promoted and managed Kendriya Vidyalaya and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya schools — has been almost completely destroyed by quasi-literate, amoral politicians who dominate the legislative assemblies of the country’s 29 states and seven Union territories. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published by the globally-respected Mumbai-based education NGO Pratham, which field tests learning outcomes of children in rural primaries in 577 districts countrywide, maths and reading skills in rural government primaries have been steadily declining since 2005 when it started publishing ASER. According to the latest ASER 2014, 51.9 percent of children in class V can’t read/comprehend class II texts and 73.9 percent can’t do simple two-digit division sums.

The quality of education provided in secondary schools is not much better. In 2010 the Union HRD ministry selected a batch of high school students from government and private schools in Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, two of India’s most educationally advanced states, to write PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) — a common test devised by OECD (a developed nations club) to test the reading, maths and science capabilities of 15-year-olds. The Indian cohort was ranked 73rd among 74 countries which wrote PISA that year. Since then the HRD ministry has opted India out of this annual test in which children from 65 countries participate.

Nor is contemporary India’s higher education system which had a considerable head start over all Asian and third world countries, anything to write home about. Ruined by reckless interference from the Central and state governments, none of the country’s 47,000 colleges and 800 universities are ranked among the world’s Top 200 in the league tables published annually by the authoritative London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or Times Higher Education, even as over half-a-dozen Chinese and South-east Asian varsities are ranked among the Top 100. 

The substantial deregulation of the Indian economy by the Narasimha Rao-led Congress government in 1991, facilitated promotion of a large number of high-end international schools in the new millennium by a new genre of education entrepreneurs who accurately discerned pent-up demand within the post-liberalisation middle class for globally benchmarked early childhood and primary-secondary education for their progeny. Demanding — and finding takers for — unprecedented high tuition fees, which enabled them to recruit expat headmasters and teachers, the country’s estimated 554 international schools affiliated with globally-respected offshore examination boards such as CIE, UK and IBO, Geneva, have raised teachers pay and perks sky-high, forcing top-ranked legacy boarding schools and academically ambitious day schools to do likewise to retain their best teachers.

The international schools-driven renaissance in K-12 education has raised teacher remuneration in all types of schools, including old-fashioned single-sex legacy boarding schools, thus attracting individuals with skills and experience. A case in point is Saurav Sinha, a history and business management alum of Delhi University and the London School of Business who returned to teach at his alma mater, the wholly residential Welham Boys, Dehradun (estb. 1937) last April, after acquiring a decade of valuable corporate experience with Standard Chartered Bank, Johnson & Johnson and Walt Disney India.

“Every boarding school student dreams of returning to teach in his old school. With life in the country’s increasingly crowded and polluted metros becoming unbearable, I’m rather envied for making this dream come true. With salaries having improved considerably in recent years, and factoring in good housing, long holidays and job satisfaction, the switch to teaching is a decision I’m unlikely to regret. Moreover with my corporate experience, I believe I have great value addition opportunities and a promising career ahead,” says Sinha.

Likewise Anshul Verma, a history postgrad of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi who was inducted into the new-genre Genesis Global School, Noida (estb.2009) — ranked among India’s Top 10 international day-cum-boarding schools countrywide in the EW India School Rankings 2015 — in April, has no regrets about his career choice. “Not only is teaching emotionally satisfying, my take-home pay of Rs.44,000 per month is higher than of my batchmates in listed companies such as TCS and Wipro. Moreover I get 155 days off as winter and summer breaks in addition to weekends. New- age pedagogies require teachers to be co-learners with students. So there are great opportunities for skills enhancement, continuous learning and innovation,” enthuses Verma.

Similarly Ishita Bains, an English literature graduate and former Times of India, Delhi reporter who earned Rs.17,000 per month four years ago in ToI, is more than content with her take-home package of Rs.40,000 per month and “much more satisfactory work-life balance and continuous skills improvement opportunities” at the CISCE-affiliated Shikshantar School, Gurgaon (estb. 2012) where she teaches English. “The demand for teachers is inelastic, so this is a recession-proof vocation. And if teachers leverage the numerous opportunities available to upgrade their skills and absorb new digital technologies, there’s a great future in this profession,” says Bains. 

But even as teaching-learning attainments and standards are beginning to improve in K-12 education, particularly in private schools which are setting the pace by investing in teacher recruitment and development, there’s the prospect of India’s infamous neta-babu class — which has substantially diminished, if not destroyed almost all the country’s institutions including Parliament, the judiciary, and law and order machinery — throwing a spanner in the works. Of late, instead of focusing their attention on improving the dismal condition of the country’s 1.20 million government schools, the country’s wrecking-ball politicians are taking great interest in ‘regulating’ tuition fees levied by private school managements.

Regrettably, the government Trojan horse is being welcomed by a rising number of subsidies-addicted middle class citizens, who shun free government schools like the plague, but balk at the prospect of paying market-driven tuition fees for their children’s education. Indeed, under parental pressure, in several states of the Union, legislative assemblies have passed laws restricting and/or regulating tuition fees in private schools. Poorly schooled themselves, such parents are unaware that government intervention in the administration of private schools — properly the province of parent-teacher associations — is certain to breed corruption, nepotism and curriculum interference.

“In Delhi and several other states there are laws relating to permissible tuition fee increases which have to be respected. Excluding capital expenditure, all expenses incurred on students, including pay rises to teachers, are permitted to be taken into account to determine tuition fees, and non-commercial, philanthropic schools are content with this formula. The problem is with big schools and school chains which have accumulated large surpluses and can well afford to improve teachers pay without raising fees. Their fee hikes should be subject to regulation,” says Delhi-based lawyer, social activist and self-proclaimed communist Ashok Agarwal, who is an active public interest litigant and self-appointed supervisor of private schools in Delhi NCR.

On the other hand Rohit Mohindra, director of the Mumbai-based Raj Mohindra Consultants Pvt. Ltd, a pioneer education consultancy which under the leadership of his father Capt. (Retd) Raj Mohindra, incumbent chairman of the company, fought a 30-year battle with the Central bureaucracy to enable the establishment of the country’s first IBO-affiliated school (Mahindra United World College, Pune, estb.1997) and also facilitated promotion of the top-ranked Dhirubhai Ambani International, Ecole Mondiale World School, Mumbai and Pathways World School, Gurgaon, cautions parents against inviting government interference in private schools. “With operating costs and salaries increasing every year, parents should accept reasonable fee increases in line with inflation. Our experience is that if they are consulted, parents usually accept reasonable fee hikes, especially if they feel they will get something in return in the form of better teaching and/or infrastructure upgradation. Unfortunately, some school managements have hiked fees in an unreasonable and arbitrary manner which has led to parent protests. But getting governments involved is self-defeating because they have neither the resources nor the experience to improve private schools. If governments took their responsibilities seriously, there would be far fewer private schools in the country,” says Mohindra.

Although one can’t rule out the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry in Delhi, which has rushed in like a bull in a china shop to fix India’s globally respected IITs and IIMs (see EW August cover feature), and overweening state legislators from interfering with private schools, with the public in general and middle class in particular having finally cottoned on that there’s no alternative to high quality primary-secondary education for improving their children’s future prospects in an increasingly competitive and complex world, the long-neglected teachers’ community is certain to experience better days ahead.

With new pay scales for government employees including teachers, scheduled to be announced in January, salaries are likely to increase by 20-30 percent.

Comments C.P. Singh, president of the Government School Teachers Association (GSTA) which represents 37,000 government school teachers in Delhi: “Our demands presented to the Seventh Pay Commission are focused on better working conditions for teachers. Currently there are 2 million students in our schools which translates into a teacher-pupil ratio of almost 1:100.

Moreover the infrastructure of government schools is very poorly maintained, and in addition to having to manage huge numbers of students, our teachers have to collect tuition fees, oversee mid-day meals and report for census and election duties.

Therefore we have made a demand to the pay commission to increase the pay of primary teachers at the entry level from the current Rs.29,565 per month to Rs.35,609 and of senior teachers from Rs.39,000 to Rs.45,000.”

Better emoluments for government school teachers is certain to positively impact the country’s 200,000 private schools favoured by the middle class which set the benchmarks in K-12 education. Inevitably, better pay packages for teachers will translate into higher tuition fees. But before panicking and calling for government controls and intervention, parents should recognise that improved wages and perks for teachers is the necessary precondition for attracting the country’s best and most idealistic graduates to serve in K-12 education. Moreover Indian parents should bear in mind that private school fees — even in the most expensive international schools — are a fraction of the cost of private school tuition fees in all other countries, developing nations included.

If high-potential India is to ever realise its long-promised but yet unrealised demographic dividend, the country’s teachers, particularly in school education, will have to be substantially rewarded with better pay and working conditions on a par with industry and the other professions. The national interest demands it.

With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai), Swati Roy (Noida), Autar Nehru (Delhi), Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) & Gauri Rane (Mumbai)