Unsung contribution of India’s private chain schools

Against the depressing backdrop of privately promoted schools overwhelmingly preferred by the middle class including low income households, being persecuted countrywide, a positive development is the growth of private chain schools – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen Despite the overwhelming majority of post-independence India’s 300 million-strong middle class availing privately provided English-medium school education, its attitude towards private initiatives in education is schizophrenic. On the one hand, upwardly mobile middle class households vote en masse for private education — especially pre-primary-class XII education — with their feet and wallets. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie’s addiction to unmerited subsidies — in effect a transfer of resources from the poor to the relatively rich — readily dispensed by India’s profligate politicians and the neta-babu brotherhood which has dominated and crippled the national development effort — makes this relatively flourishing class resentful about paying the market price of good quality education. Although few middle class households choose to send their children to government schools even though they provide free-of-charge education, they are readily in the vanguard of protests against private schools raising their rising tuition fees. They want — demand — first world private education at third world prices. This sustained demand of the country’s powerful and influential middle class for private education at rock-bottom prices has prompted almost all state governments to enact legislation to cap school fees, particularly annual fee hikes that are inevitable within an economy in which double-digit inflation is normative. Largely ignorant of the reality that private education in contemporary India is cheaper than in any other country worldwide, the Indian bourgeoisie has persuaded Parliament, state governments and even the learned judges of the upper judiciary to enact and uphold legislation which severely circumscribes the fundamental right of private citizens to engage in the business of education provision at all levels. Indeed since the 1970s when the country’s hyper-socialist prime minister Indira Gandhi packed the Supreme Court with ideologically “committed” judges, in numerous convoluted judgements, the apex court has ruled that privately provided school and higher education is necessarily a philanthropic activity and has repeatedly deplored the “commercialisation of education”, a phrase that’s become the mantra of populist politicians, the establishment, business-illiterate academics, and jholawalas who dominate the national development discourse. The logic of education being permitted as a legitimate business activity on a par with provision of food, shelter and clothing, has eluded — and continues to elude — the establishment, including learned justices of free India’s much-acclaimed independent judiciary. In the historic Union budget of July 1991, the Indian economy was substantially liberalised and deregulated. And in 2002 in a historic judgement in T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs. Union of India & Ors, delivered by a full 11-judge bench, the Supreme Court (by a thin majority) recognised the fundamental right of all citizens to establish and administer education institutions of their choice as a “vocation”. The majority upheld the right of private professional education institutions to devise their own admission processes subject to admitting meritorious students in…