Licence-permit-quota raj, which was the dominant development blueprint of post-independence India and devastated the country’s economy reducing the average annual rate of GDP growth to 3.5 percent (cf. the Asian average of 7-10 percent) for over four decades until liberalisation and deregulation in 1991, is alive and flourishing in Indian education. Although the ease of doing business has marginally improved in the post-liberalisation era, reaching education to the masses and classes has become more difficult than ever before.
Curiously, the Central and state governments which have made a mess of managing the country’s 1.2 million public primary/elementary schools and the great majority of government colleges and universities, see nothing amiss in neta-babu interference with the administration, syllabuses, curriculums, and finances of the country’s 319,000 private primary-secondary schools, estimated 20,000 private colleges and 154 private universities. They are subject to a bewildering plethora of laws, rules, regulations and administrative fiats, which have not only made the promotion of private greenfield institutions a great obstacles clearance race, but have also endangered their financial viability. This despite it being plain as a pikestaff that privately-promoted schools in particular, are far superior on the parameters of infrastructure, learning outcomes, leadership quality, faculty competence etc.
Proof of this assertion is the reality that the overwhelming majority of the country’s 60 million middle class households prefer to enroll their children in fees-levying private schools rather than in free-of-charge government primary-secondaries. Indeed, even the poorest households entertain this aspiration which explains the mushrooming of an estimated 300,000 ‘unrecognised’ private budget schools with a staggering reported enrolment of 60 million children across the country.
But the country’s rampaging neta-babu nexus, driven by political populism and rent-seeking opportunities, is crushing India’s private schools, which host over 40 percent of in-school children through myriad levelling-down rules which are drying up the flow of investment into private education. Our cover story written by managing editor Summiya Yasmeen blows the whistle on the neta-babu conspiracy to dumb down India’s beleaguered private schools, islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity.
And in what’s become an annual ritual, we lament another myopic Union budget in which the finance minister has yet again missed the opportunity to make adequate provision for developing the country’s abundant human capital. According top priority to feathering its own nest and self-aggrandisement, the very same neta-babu nexus wastes taxpayers money on a grand scale, leaving little more than crumbs for investment in public education and human capital development, while the apathetic middle class, intelligentsia, academia and media are silent — perhaps collusive — spectators.
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