The start of the new academic year marks the culmination of a season when parents are obliged to pull every string and use their influence with politicians, bureaucrats, high court judges and even media personnel to put in a word for admission of their wards into the country’s top-ranked day, boarding and international schools. Dilip Thakore investigates

For the great majority of middle class India’s young parents with children in the age group four-six, the start of the new academic year in June marks the culmination of months of frenzied running around to secure admission into primary-secondary schools of their choice. Except for parents in the super-rich bracket who have the option of enrolling their offspring in the multiplying number of new private international schools affiliated with offshore examination boards and levying tuition fees of Rs.3-5 lakh per year, other households have a hard time getting their children into affordable English-medium (aka ‘convent’) schools whose number is estimated at 70,000 countrywide.

This is the season when parents are obliged to pull every string and use their influence with politicians, bureaucrats, high court judges and even media personnel, to put in a word with promoters, trustees, headmasters and principals of the country’s best day, legacy boarding and even the top new genre international schools, to admit their wards. Consequently it’s also a harrowing time for school principals who often become incomm-unicado, as phone calls and chits from the country’s highest offices impose unbearable pressure upon them to make out-of-turn admissions.

Regrettable but true, the mad rush for school admissions also provides opportunity for less upright private school promoters and principals to make windfall gains by demanding illegal  capitation fees and donations through a network of agents including in a famous instance, a barber plying his trade in the neighbourhood of a top-ranked vintage day school in Bangalore. Principals and parents are well aware that venal, patronage-dispensing politicians and bureaucrats at the Centre and in the states have ruined the country’s 1.20 million government primary schools, rendering them a no-go zone for the upwardly mobile middle class.

Therefore for the 60 million middle-class households, admission into India’s 80,000 (200,000 as enumerated by government which counts primary, upper primary, high and higher secon-dary schools as separate units) private schools is a do-or-die mission, which will determine and shape the future of their children. But with the ‘supply’ of new schools constricted by soaring real estate prices, bureaucratic red tape and corruption for which contemporary India has acquired global notoriety, the pressure for admission into the country’s 80,000 ‘recognised’ private schools is intensifying year on year.

Even the lower subaltern classes which had hitherto been fobbed off with indifferent, free-of-charge government vernacular education, are begin-ning to flee in growing numbers to the country’s estimated 400,000 illegal private ‘budget’ schools which offer English language, even if not English-medium education while demanding — and getting — tuition fees of Rs.100-500 per month. According to a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (education for all) programme analysis for Karnataka, reported in the Times of India (July 9), the “decrease in student strength in class I-X in government schools, bet-ween 2006-07 and 2012-13, is 1.23 million. Of these, 399,000 may be discounted because of demographic changes. The remaining 832,000 children are lost to a lateral shift to private schools”.

An example of the extent to which private schools distinguished by their English education (in sharp contrast to government schools which insist upon mother tongue/vernacular languages as the medium of instruction and often refuse to teach English even as a second language in primary classes) have lately captured the imagination of the sub-altern classes is indicated by an initiative of the traditionally oppressed Dalit or scheduled castes and tribes community which has continued to suffer multiple deprivations in independent India.

On April 30, 2010 Dalits of the backward district of Bankagaon in Uttar Pradesh pledged to learn the English language. On the occasion, they also laid the foundation of a temple dedicated to ‘English, the Dalit Goddess’. “If you learn English, you too can scale the heights Babasaheb did,” said Eshan Kumar Gangania, a local school teacher referring to Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (1891-1956), the chief author of the Constitution of India and a Dalit icon (Times of India May 9, 2010).

However Dr. Narendar Pani, an economics alumnus of JNU and Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, former senior editor of The Economic Times (1987-2007) and curr-ently professor of conflict resolution and multi-disciplinary approaches to economic issues at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, is unimpressed by the rising tide of public opinion in favour of private English-medium school education. “The fasci-nation with English medium is not related with the quality of education dispensed in private schools; it is aspirational and the outcome of peer pressure. Most so-called English-medium schools deliver poor quality education which damages the home environment of students without producing adequately English-fluent employable adults. In fast growth states and regions such as Tamil Nadu and coastal Karnataka, local languages have not been sacrificed at the altar of English,” says Pani.

This argument is typical of the Indian academy — especially Left intellectuals — often themselves alumni of English-medium schools who turn a deliberate blind-eye to the socio-economic reality that the country’s best corporate and even government jobs are appropriated by English-fluent individuals. However, Pani concedes that English — the link language of the country and prereq-uisite of commerce and cooperation between India’s 28 linguistically demarcated states — should be rigorously taught as a second language because Indians are “naturally bilingual and perhaps even trilingual”. “There is a via media between the West Bengal model (under the communists who completely banned teaching of English in primary schools for over three decades) and some elite public schools which completely ignore Indian languages. The Central and state governments should publicise the new reality that top jobs in government and even corporate India are no longer the preserve of  people from English-medium schools,” he adds.

Yet compulsory imposition of the state’s dominant vernacular language  and/or student’s mother tongue as the medium of instruction in early childhood and primary school education, which is implicit in the arguments advanced by Pani and most Indian academics, was unanimously rejected by a three-judge bench of the Karnataka high court in 2008. While conceding the right of state governments to impose the dominant language of the state or mother tongue upon students in gover-nment and government-subsidised schools, the learned judges struck down a state government order of 1994 which made it mandatory for all primary — including private unaided — schools to teach in Kannada or the mother tongue.

“The government policy to have mother tongue or regional language as the medium of instruction at the primary level is valid and legal in the case of schools run or aided by the State. But the government policy compelling children studying in other government recognised schools to have primary education only in the mother tongue is violative of Articles 19 (1) (g), 26 and 30 (1) of the Constitution of India… The choice of medium of instruction is that of the child and it should be left to the parents of the child. It is the element of compulsion which is frowned upon. It is arbitrary. It offends fundamental rights guaranteed to the citizens of this country… If parents want their children to have primary education in English medium, they are not committing any crime. It is not illegal. It is not opposed to public policy,” ruled the court in Associated Managements of (Govern-ment Recognised Unaided English Medium) Primary and Secondary Schools in Karnataka (KAMS) vs. State of Karnataka & Ors (Writ Petition No. 14363/1994).

Nevertheless so deeply embedded is Soviet-style control-and-command culture within the entire political class, that instead of accepting this common-sense judgement of the high court, the successor BJP government which was voted into office in 2007 filed an appeal in the Supreme Court which finally came up for hearing on July 5 this year. Admitting that the “reorganisation of States was primarily based on language” and that the “vital question involved in this petition has a far-reaching signifi-cance on the development of the children in our country who are the future adults”, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court referred the matter to a larger constitutional bench of the court for full and final adjudication which is pending.

But even as unending arguments about the merits and demerits of imposing vernacular languages as the medium of instruction in primary education rage within academia and government, the grassroots reality is that the overwhelming majority of  private education entrepreneurs (‘edup-reneurs’) — even if not jholawallah social activists — are only interested in promoting English-medium schools. The industry and business class which has the wherewithal to invest in private education is patently unimpressed by academic opinion that children learn best in their regional language and/or mother tongue. Neither are the middle and aspirational class of parents who are only too aware that English education opens up countrywide — and international — employment opportunities for children when they transform into adults.

Curiously this elementary logic and the reality that deeply researched  textbooks haven’t been written or translated into the country’s 22 major regional and vernacular languages, eludes the country’s anti-English intellectuals foolishly ready to jettison India’s historic English language legacy,  perhaps the greatest edge this country has over neighbouring China in the global development race. Nor do they seem perturbed — as they should be — by the widely reported statistic that over 300 million Chinese children and youth, unburdened by the nit-picking analysis-paralysis which is the hallmark of the Indian intelligentsia, are intensively learning English — the global language of business and commerce (see box).

Unfortunately, although the country’s leftist intelligentsia is small, it continues to heavily influence policy formulation and legislation relating to education development and dissem-ination. Consequently for over the past six decades since independence, prom-otion of new private education instit-utions has become a complicated process, discouraged by law and heavily regulated by the Central and state gov-ernments. A vast array of ill-considered rules and regulations covering promo-tion and administration of private schools and professional education institutions, has transformed private education into a high-risk proposition subject to numerous road-blocks, persis-tent interference and shakedowns by venal education officials and inspectors in the states.

Moreover despite an estimated 30-40 percent of school-going children attending private schools across the country, to this day education isn’t recognised as a legitimate business activity by law. Profiting from “commercialisation of education” is prohibited by law and there are several judgements of the Supreme Court to this effect. All education institutions are obliged to be administered by not-for-profit societies and charitable trusts. Given this heavily over-regulated environment within which private schools have to conduct their business — and business it remains with the help of clever lawyers and legal advice — it’s unsurprising that capacity creation in private primary-secondary (and professional higher) education hasn’t kept pace with demand.

“It’s very hard for working parents to get their children admitted into private schools in Delhi. The application process is taxing, requiring many annexures and attachments, some requiring attestation. Last year to get my daughter admitted into a good English-medium school, I had to take time off from work to collect admission appli-cation forms of 25 schools, stand in queues, and request help from relatives and friends. This has become the norm for all middle class parents in the national capital. Despite all this, my daughter failed to get admission in the first or second lists in any of the schools. Fortunately someone told us about the alumnus status of my husband in a convent school in our neighbourhood, which granted her admission on that basis. But the whole process was very time consuming and stressful,” says Pratibha Maahindrau, an alumna of Shri Ram College of Commerce and Jamia Millia Islamia University and currently a market intelligence manager of a multinational in Delhi.

According to R.C. Jain, president of the Delhi State Public Schools Manag-ements Association and convenor of the Delhi-based National Independent Schools Alliance, school admissions are a nightmare in the national capital because constant government interfer-ence and stifling regulations are killing private schools in Delhi. “Eighty Delhi state government schools and another 220 MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) schools have shut down in the  past two years because people don’t want to send their children to dysfun-ctional government schools. On the other hand private schools are being targeted and harassed to the point that people are discouraged from starting new schools even as migrants’ influx into Delhi continues unabated, putting a lot of pressure on existing schools. Meanwhile, principals and managements of reputed schools are harassed by threatening phone calls and recommendations from politicians, bureau-crats, police officers, and business tycoons for admission of their children,” laments Jain.

Parental stress and institutional disenchantment is not peculiar to Delhi. All over the country middle class parents are obliged to run from pillar to post and experience the humiliation of having to beg, importune and often bribe private school promoters, principals and politicians, bureaucrats and others with influence. Paradoxically, although it is difficult and arduous to promote greenfield private schools which require massive investment and myriad government clearances, once they are open for business, English-medium K-12 institutions even when managed with minimal academic and administrative competence, quickly enjoy seller’s market advantages, given the rising demand for quality education. In Mumbai, getting admission into affordable private schools is an even more difficult proposition for lower income parents who lack the money and influence of the middle and upper classes.

“It’s very tough to get admission into a good school. I have lost track of the trips and number of queues I have stood in to get admission for my daughter Bhakti aged five. I was determined to avoid the Bombay municipal corpor-ation’s free-of-charge schools  where the quality of education is poor and English — which is so important these days — is  not taught. Therefore I persisted with my efforts to get admission into the Thomas Academy, Goregaon, an English-medium school, and eventually I was successful. The monthly tuition fee I pay for senior KG is Rs.900, but I’m confident about a bright future for my daughter. Next year when she enters class I, I’m hopeful she’ll get free education under the RTE Act. Then I’ll be able to enroll my second daughter in nursery,” says Manisha Vijay Ubale, a single parent domestic worker who services three homes and earns an annual income of Rs.50,000.

Comments Lina Ashar, the Mumbai-based promoter chairperson of the Kangaroo Kids (118 preschools) and Billabong High International (14) schools: “Fear and uncertainty about government policy and apprehensions about dilution of autonomy have dampened the enthu-siasm of private investors including philanthropists, from entering school education. To reduce the supply-demand gap in school education, we should learn from the example of Sweden. Reforms introduced in 1994 in that very socialist country allow any person who satisfies basic standards to start schools and admit children at government expense.”

Such drastic policy reversal in K-12 education has become necessary because sustained government neglect of education — for the past 65 years official expenditure on public education has averaged a mere 3.5 percent of GDP (Centre plus states) against the global average of 5 percent and OECD coun-tries’ average of 7-10 percent — and particularly official indifference to the type of primary-secondary education demanded by the public, has created a demand-supply bottleneck which is ballooning into a crisis. To compound the problem, instead of moving ahead with large-scale reforms to improve public education, state governments have devised numerous rules and regulations to discourage private initia-tives in primary-secondary education.

“In sharp contrast to the situation in other developing countries, it’s very difficult to promote greenfield education institutions in India, and running schools offering globally benchmarked education is a high-cost business for which banks and institutional lenders are reluctant to advance credit. Simul-taneously after the Sixth Pay Commission award, teachers’ salaries have risen to unprecedented levels. And with the quality gap between government and private schools continuously widening, the rush for admission into English-medium schools will increase with the passage of time,” predicts Nilanjan Dey, an alumnus of Calcutta University and former journalist and currently promoter-director of Wishlist Education Services which promoted the Purple Petals pre-primary school in Kolkata in 2007.

An unforeseen outcome of the abysmal state of education dispensed in government schools is the quiet mush-rooming of private ‘budget’ schools whose number is variously estimated at a phenomenal 400,000-1.5 million countrywide. Typically, these are ramshackle tin-roofed, two-room institutions run by self-styled educationists driven by modest profit motives. Unsurpri-singly, budget school edupreneurs engaged in the “commercialisation of education” are hate figures of Left intellectuals who dominate Indian academia. But quite obviously they provide valuable services — especially English learning if not English medium instruction, as most of them claim. If not, why would bottom-of-the-pyramid households struggling to make ends meet sign up their children?

According to Dr. James Tooley, professor of education policy at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, private budget school entrepreneurs are the unsung heroes who have stepped into the breach created by deficient government schools to provide reasonable quality primary education to poor households not only in India, but around the world. In his seminal but under-appreciated (if not unofficially suppressed) book The Beautiful Tree (Viking/Penguin 2009), Tooley argues that private budget schools which levy tuition fees of $2-5 per month have helped to raise millions of children out of poverty. But evidently The Beautiful Tree hasn’t impressed the Indian intelligentsia or mandarins of the Union ministry of human resource development. Under the landmark Right to Education Act, 2009, all ‘unrecognised’ private schools failing to meet the infrastructure norms prescribed in s. 19 and Schedule of the Act — which in effect means all private budget schools — will be compulsorily shut down. In the event, pressure for admission into recognised private English-medium schools which is already at explosion point will intensify — a nightmarish prospect for middle class households across the country.

“You should advise only your worst enemy to promote a private school in Andhra Pradesh because every activity from constructing a school to managing it is a big headache,” says S. Srinivas Reddy, president of the Hyderabad-based Private School Managements Association which has a membership of 8,000 private unaided schools. “Accor-ding to the Andhra Pradesh Education Act, 1982, the state government is obliged to conduct a survey in each urban ward, reserve land and invite applications for establishing private schools. However since 1982, not a single application notification has been issued by any state administration. With the result school promoters have to purchase land at market prices, start functioning on their own without government recognition and are at the mercy of education authorities and school inspectors. Currently there are over 15,000 high-end unrecognised schools in Andhra Pradesh. Lack of government support and scarcity of trained teachers apart, our member schools are under close watch of several human rights organisations which dictate tuition fees and rules and regulations,” adds Reddy.

Even in the southern state of Kerala (pop.33 million) which is lauded for its literacy (98 percent) and excellent social indicators, private investment in educ-ation is viewed with deep suspicion and resentment despite the fact that the state’s high literacy is the handiwork of faith (Christian, Muslim) and community (Nair, Ezahava etc) schools. Harish K.E, chief executive of Sadbhavna Holdings Pvt. Ltd — a company founded by several Dubai and UAE migrants from Kerala, which promoted the IGCSE and CBSE-affiliated K-12 Sadbhavna World School in Kozhikode in 2008 at a project cost of Rs.17 crore — is disillusioned with red tape and teachers unions in India’s most literate state.

“Kerala’s high literacy has been enabled by private — not government — schools. However private education is highly polarized along religious, community and caste lines. We are determined to establish a chain of non-religious and wholly integrated English-medium world class schools. But we have been discouraged at every step of the way by the government machinery, trade unions with even the public showing little appreciation of our initiative,” says Harish.

Even as a succession of ministers in Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi (which houses the Union HRD ministry) and state capitals come and go without addressing the basic problems of K-12 education — capacity creation, impr-oving teaching-learning standards in government schools and responding to parents’ demand for English — citizens are taking recourse to desperate measures.

Dhurjyoti Bhattacharya, a Gandhi-nagar-based journalist with a national daily and his wife Purabi, hitherto professor of English at the Institute of Teachers Education, Gandhinagar, have responded radically to the severe shortage of internationally comparable school education in Gujarat where English-medium schools are also officially discouraged. “The pitiable condition to which many parents are reduced in getting their children admitted into respectable schools is a major factor behind our decision not to start a family,” says Bhattacharya.

Adds Sukhdev Patel, Gujarat state convenor of the anti-corruption Aam Admi Party: “Of the 200,000 primary school teachers and 400,000 government employees in Gujarat, a very small number send their children to government schools. Teaching-learning stand-ards in these schools are very poor and therefore great pressure for admissions is exerted on private schools.”

With admission into top-ranked English-medium private day schools in the metros having become almost impossible except for the children of well-heeled alumni, and with constr-uction of greenfield primary-secondaries inhibited by sky-high land prices, a steadily growing number of parents are prepared to send their children to boarding and even new genre inter-national schools at great expense. But even in these institutions, admission is not a cakewalk for much the same reasons. Demand-supply imbalances have emerged because state government regulations and official corruption have raised promoters’ costs exorbitantly.

According to A.J. Singh, the doughty promoter-principal of the Pinegrove School, Solan (Himachal Pradesh), it took seven years of groundwork to get all the requisite state government permissions and land consolidation agreements registered before he could commence construction of the wholly residential Pinegrove (estb. 1991).

“Government banks and development agencies were no help at all and I had to raise the entire capital required myself. Promotion and establishment of boarding schools is a tough proposition requiring great determination and staying power. This is why only four new residential schools have been promoted in the hills of North India after independence, of whom Pinegrove is perhaps the only success story,” says Singh, a former housemaster at the Doon School, Dehradun. The CBSE-affiliated Pinegrove (annual tuition fee: Rs.2.5 lakh) is indeed a success story. Last year, it received 500 applications against which the management admitted 125 students.

Perhaps the only edupreneur who believes that promoting greenfield schools is no big deal is Bangalore-based A. Maryappa, promoter and chief trustee of the Vidyashankari English School, Kengeri, Bangalore (estb. 1983), a state board-affiliated English-medium K-X school. “If a school promoter studies the rules and regulations thoroughly, abides by them and is prepared to enforce them through the courts, promoting new schools isn’t a problem. Following the high court order in KAMS vs. State of Karnataka which has allowed promotion of English-medium schools, it is easy to get a court directive if there is opposition by the state government,” says Maryappa, secretary of Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association (KUSMA).

Quite obviously, Maryappa is confi-dent about the apex court upholding the Karnataka high court’s commonsense judgement in KAMS vs. State of Karnataka. Nevertheless by imposing regional and vernacular languages as the medium of instruction in primary education and/or prohibiting the teaching of English for several decades, the governments of large and populous states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajas-than, Karnataka among others — have plunged primary-secondary education into deep crisis.  The original sin of  inability to raise teaching-learning standards and curb chronic teacher absenteeism in government schools, is being compounded by discouraging the promotion of private schools — especially English-medium schools — which parent communities countrywide prefer.

Driven by reckless sub-nationalism and self-serving parochialism, India’s politicians seem determined to squander the English language advantage  — arguably the most precious legacy of almost two centuries (1757-1947) of  British rule over India.  To the long litany of woes of the nation — poverty, mass illiteracy, casteism, corruption, communalism and persistent inflation — the unworthy heirs of the Mahatma have added one more: substandard primary-secondary education which will blight the future of generation next. This is the time for all right thinking citizens to speak up and stem the rot.

With Sunayana Nair (Mumbai), Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata), Autar Nehru (Delhi) & R.K. Misra (Ahmedabad)