Education | Policy
Indian Education: Between the State and the Market
How India’s Private, Public, and NGO Schools Can Complement Each Other to Create a Stronger, Unified Education System
Note: This article is co-authored with Madhav Joshi, and stems from our experience volunteering at Ayukta, a zero-funds organization that teaches the children of domestic workers and drivers online during the Covid19 pandemic. This article was published by The Swaddle, an independent media company deeply committed to the diversity of perspectives in media narratives. You can find the published version here.
“The government has an execution deficit, the private sector has a trust deficit and civil society has a scale deficit.” — Manish Sabharwal
Access to quality education, undoubtedly, has a significant impact on society. It serves as the backbone of the workforce and helps individuals make informed decisions in their daily lives. However, in India, discussions about education generally culminate with public and private schools as direct substitutes for each other. The public schools endeavour to make education accessible while private schools aim for efficiency and profits. The dichotomy of our education system has pushed everyone into the all too daunting conflict between the public and the private schools.
In a pursuit to ensure both accessibility and efficiency, our formal education system approaches the two goals separately. There is little acknowledgment of opportunities at the intersection of the two agencies. If we can combine the merits of both the providers, we can empower every citizen with foundational education and shift our focus on continuous learning.
The State, through government schools, takes the position to work towards public welfare. By doing so, it takes the duty to extend education to even the lowest economic strata. This leads to the public sector in education enjoying legitimacy among large sections of people which is absent from non-public actors. However, it falls short in delivering quality education at an aggregate level. This is in no way an indication of misplaced intentions, but a deficit in efficiently catering to a breadth of stakeholders beyond its capacity. Additionally, public schools have a negative price after accounting for the provision of mid-day meals, textbooks, and other necessary resources (Muralidharan, 2019).
It is then not surprising that over 40% of school enrolment in India is in private schools, with large cities having over 70% enrolment(Ernst and Young LLP & FICCI, 2014). This data indicates the preference for private education voicing better management quality. With a greater number of people opting for private schools, it skews the capacity to advocate for students’ education needs in favour of private school goers. This further increases the gap between the public and private schools and concentrates the economically disadvantaged to government schools. They are left with very little bargaining power for better quality. Such social costs tend to create a trust deficit in the private schools in the long-term.
Consequently, only the State is in the position to resolve the polarized system by extending a model of partnership and co-dependence. Instead of shouldering the burden on its own, it can outsource education or certain aspects of it for improved efficiency. The State has tried to bridge the gap through the Model School Scheme (Department of School Education and Literacy, 2016) and a reimbursement plan under the RTE Act. However, these policies have poor implementation at the national and state level. Moreover, these methods strip away the institutions’ autonomy by restricting educational institutions to the impulses of the State. This inevitably disposes these institutions to opt-out of policies mentioned above, through exceptions, rather than attempting to implement the same.
A step to bridge the gap would be to enable people with access to their choice of schooling. For instance, if there is a system where the economically weaker sections have a choice outside government schools, it increases their palette. Education vouchers (Weidrich, 2003), an approach where government funding follows the student’s choice. If a family chooses a school whose fees are beyond their means, the government grants them help by funding. It breaks the traditional top-down approach, creating a decentralized and competitive system of schools. This step could further be supplemented with subsidies to the participating schools in procuring uniforms, books, lab equipment, and other resources. However, providing vouchers and subsidies are only one-step solutions that will be ineffective unless we break away from the binary of government and private schools.
Another disadvantage of a siloed system of education at such a scale is its inability to adapt to difficult situations. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that our education ecosystem has no deficiency in motivation. Yet, both the public and private schools faced a delay in transitioning to an online approach to schooling. Even when they were able to, there was a significant lack of training and instructions issued to teachers (The Wire, 2020) to cope with this new method.
In the meantime, individual actors and NGOs have illustrated greater agility and efficiency in the educational ecosystem. For instance, Ayukta, an NGO dedicated to building an equitable learning environment responded to the educational deficit caused in light of the global pandemic. Even at its nascent stage, it provided quality education to children from impoverished households through WhatsApp video calls or telephonic calls when physical schooling was not feasible. Although this illustrates the social trust that civil society attracts, it also calls attention to the fact that civil society suffers from being able to scale up to the level of public or private schools without sufficient backing.
Adversities such as these exacerbate and highlight the insidious issues prevalent in our education system. The way forward is to address them at the grassroots level by giving families the ability to choose their preferred system of education. However, the choices have to go beyond the typology of private and public schools. It calls for these traditional actors to complement their roles as education providers by extending efficient options of public financing and private delivery. This partnership will not only contribute to a robust learning environment but also provide a platform for individual actors to fill the gap where the institutions can’t currently reach.
Reference
Department of School Education and Literacy. (2016, May 17). Scheme for setting up of 2,500 Model Schools under Public-Private Partnership (PPP) mode. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. Retrieved December 7, 2020, from https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/upload_document/Scheme-MS-PPP_-_clean-NEW_0.pdf
Ernst and Young LLP & FICCI. (2014). Private sector’s contribution to K-12 education in India Current impact, challenges and way forward. Ernst and Young LLP. http://ficci.in/events/21818/ISP/EY-FICCI%20Report-Private-sectors-contribution%20to-K-12-%20education-in-India.pdf
Muralidharan, K. (2019, October 30). The State and the Market in Education Provision: Evidence and the Way Ahead. UC San Diego Social Sciences Economics- Karthik Muralidharan. Retrieved December 7, 2020, from https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/papers/Working%20Papers/State_and_Market_in_Education%20(Current%20WP).pdf
Weidrich, E. (2003). Education Vouchers: Is there a Model for India? In Education (pp. 356–377). Centre for Civil Society.
The Wire. (2020, November 18). Online School Education in India Proving Ineffective, Inadequate: Study. The Wire. https://thewire.in/education/online-education-government-schools-study
