Private schools on warpath: the empire strikes back

Banners of revolt against steady erosion of the autonomy of private schools are being unfurled across the country. On August 16, the National Foundation for Promotion and Protection of Private Education is scheduled to be formally launched in Mumbai to lobby for a fair deal for India’s private schools. Dilip Thakore reports The summer of 2012 has been a season of setbacks for india’s 200,000 private primary-secondary schools which host 40 percent of the country’s school-going children. Although it’s an open secret that the minimal progress in terms of national development recorded by post-independence India is attributable to the efforts of private schools — rather than the dysfunctional 1.25 million government schools defined by crumbling infrastructure,  chronic teacher absenteeism, multigrade teaching and obsolete syllabuses —  which have educated and nurtured the nation’s productive middle class, a pall  of fear about discriminatory regulation, populist intervention and dumbing down teaching-learning standards surrounds them. These fears have been accentuated this summer, after the Supreme Court’s judgement of April 12 in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (2010), which substantially upheld the populist Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) enabling the Central and state governments to reserve a quota for poor neighbourhood children, even in wholly financially autonomous schools. Under the Big Brother hybrid socialist model of development imposed upon the historically free enterprise subcontinent by Master Joe (aka Jawaharlal Nehru) and the Dynasty after independence, private schools — some with lineages stretching back over a century — have always been subject to the unwelcome attentions of an 18 million-strong neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) kleptocracy which has emerged as free India’s most powerful and materially successful community. However, regulation was hitherto restricted to erecting roadblocks to private initiatives in primary-secondary education, dictation of broad curriculum norms and periodic visits by fault-finding, rents-seeking education department inspectors. Now for the first time in the history of Indian education, the RTE Act has imposed a government quota on private schools, unaided (i.e, financially independent of government) schools included. As per s.12 (1) (c) of the RTE Act, which became law on April 1, 2010, all private schools — aided or unaided — are obliged to reserve 25 percent capacity in preschool (in integrated institutions) or class I, for children from socio-economically disadvantaged households in their (schools’) neighbourhood. Inevitably, the constitutional validity of this unprecedented government quota — even on wholly independent private schools — was challenged in the Supreme Court. However in a surprise 2-1 judgement delivered by a three-judge bench in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan,  the apex court upheld s.12 (1) (c) despite the government making it clear it will not pay tuition fees prescribed by the school, but the equivalent of the state governments’ expenditure per child in their own government schools. But the judges unanimously exempted minority and boarding schools from applicability of the section. Unsurprisingly, the formulation, passage through Parliament and judicial endorsement of the RTE Act tantamount to “backdoor nationalisation”,…