[This is Essay #6 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for archives]

A case against private education
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Anoop Saha

Gautam used to occasionally take me on his rickshaw from my home to the metro station in my part of Delhi during the summers of 2007. At around 17 years of age and a dalit hailing from a small village near Baliya (UP) Gautam was interesting to talk to. Like last year, this summers too Gautam was in Delhi driving a hired rickshaw, so that he could make enough money for his school fees to be deposited by August. I could easily perceive that he was a smart kid with a deep desire to learn, one who could tell me the basic difference between Aristotelean and Newtonian mechanics. Gautam had the option to go to the essentially free government high school in his village and not spend the summers as a rickshaw puller in an unknown city. He laughed off that option, because in the sarkari school, “teacher bhaang padkar aata tha”. I had never had any illusions about the quality of our sarkari schools, and not for the first time I was so close to a victim of this unequal system.

Almost everyone, from the left to the right, from Adam Smith, Milton Friedman to Karl Marx and Amartya Sen, everyone was clear about the importance of education in the development of the society. So were the people who drafted India’s constitution. Yet education, specially public education, remains one of the most neglected sectors of modern India. Not only are our “public” schools in a very bad shape, we have one of the world’s highest dropout rates in primary schools.

A large part of the blame goes to the priorities set in the constitution itself and in our federal setup. While most of the taxes and funds go to the federal reserve (central government), the crucial responsibility of public education and public health are delegated to the state governments. The right to get educated was put in a loosely defined and ill implemented non-justiciable directive principles of the constitution. Starved of funds, and devoid of any control or public pressure, the schooling system rotted in state after state. Opaque recruitment policies ensured that the “bhang pine wale” teachers were preserved and promoted.

The solution comes from two ends. One section want market to take care of our entire education system, with a mandatory dole from the government to the individual to take care of those needs And then from some quarters of the left comes the (dis)ingenious solution of forcing the children of government teachers attend the government schools to improve the quality of government schools. And then many like West Bengal had banned english from the school syllabus, in a country where even the supreme court accepts evidence written only in the english language and put the majority in a natural disadvantage. Again, no solution is complete as long as it does not set a good career path for Gautam, without making him work in the streets of Delhi.

Education cannot be left as merely an individual pursuit, an investment that benefits the person and his/her family. It is not a commodity, With its potential to alter lives and creating a more elevated society, quality education is a fundamental right of every individual. It cannot be denied to anyone either by the state or any other entity. State is the only institution entrusted with deploying and preserving the fundamental rights. As a basic human right, the state must ensure that immaterial to financial status and distance from urban areas, everybody has access to good schools and colleges.

86th amendment, passed in 2002, did just that. It defined education as a fundamental right for everyone between the ages 6 to 14. The corresponding law has not yet being enacted, partly because the government claims that it does not have enough funds to open one school within one mile of every village. The government’s claim is as absurd as it can be. We spend a measly 3% of our GDP on education. This is less than what most other developing and developed countries do. Without significantly increasing government spending to at least 6% of GDP, nothing can be achieved.

Note that government education is NOT free education. The money comes from the taxes paid by every individual. Having a far larger number of stakeholders and with a precise mandate, the government schools need to be even more quality concsious. There are two main reasons for the relative success of kendriya vidyalas across the country, and to a lesser extent of that of navodaya vidyalas. Generous funding from the center and egalitarian admission policies. When the mali’s son goes to the same school as the collector’s daughter, and sits in the same classroom, standards will naturally improve. Without adequate diversity, the entire education system tends to rot.

And that is the reason why India cannot allow private schools to proliferate without any regulation. Not only does uninhibited private education create hierarchies in the society by the principle of exclusion, the state is also betraying its own responsibilities. Every single country that has banned private schools, went on to drastically improve the quality of education of its citizens. We don’t need to go that far, in fact, the first step is to drastically improve the quality and quantity of existing government schools. The moment we recognize education as a fundamental human right, no school has a right to deny admission to any student based on financial grounds. People do have a right to get their wards the best possible education that money can buy, but your right ceases to be a fundamental right the moment it infringes on my rights.

No discussion on education is complete without going into the state of government teachers. Having seen my mother as a primary school teacher in a government school for more than 25 years, in a school that was without a pakka building till 2004, let me share my insights. A teacher is expected not only to teach students, but to act as unpaid labour for implementing all government schemes. So a teacher becomes a voter’s id registrar to election observer to pulse polio administrator, and if everything fails, the “nar nari ek samaan” slogan painter on walls of the village. And after that they were the last to get paid, my mother’s salary was usually delayed by at least a month. It is very important to put a stop to all such practices. A teacher must be paid well for the job that he/she is paid for. That is to teach well. And there are no dearth of ideas on how to measure the performance of the teacher.