Shiksha Bachao Abhiyan: School vouchers to revamp primary education? Time India debated efficacy of programme

On 7 April, private schools from across the country (an overwhelming majority of them budget private schools) converged at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi for a Shiksha Bachao (Save Education) rally. Coming together under the aegis of the National Coalition for School Education, they demanded more autonomy for schools and a voucher programme to give parents a choice of schools. Also that day, heavyweights of the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi were tweeting pictures of swanky government schools that could rival the facilities of many private schools. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted about how the trend of government school students envying those in private schools had now reversed. [caption id=“attachment_4332901” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters.[/caption] No, this is not to imply that the tweets were meant to undercut the impact of the rally. There’s another reason for linking the two. For quite some time now, the Delhi government has been at pains to counter the negative image that government schools are saddled with. It has also spent a lot of effort in revamping the government school system in Delhi – upgrading infrastructure, sending teachers for training, holding regular parent-teacher meetings, among other things. (A caveat: these do not cover schools managed by the municipal corporations, which are not under the jurisdiction of the state government.) There may be a lesson here for other state governments about how to up the game of state-run schools. But which category of private schools should government schools be competing with? And what economic group should they be targeting? By focussing on buildings and facilities, the Delhi government appears to be targeting children from middle-class families. But these are not the children who are abandoning government schools; they never went to them anyway. The ones who are forsaking government schools are children from the lower middle class. Their parents are pulling them out of government schools where education is free and mid-day meals are provided and which are in spacious premises, and putting them in private schools even though they charge around Rs 500 a month on an average and function out of dingy - possibly unsafe - buildings. They want their children to get a quality education, which government schools do not provide. This trend is not confined to Delhi but is spread across the country. Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, of the University of College London, has trawled data from the District Information System of Education (DISE) to show that between 2010-11 and 2016-17, 8,337 additional government schools came up across 20 states. The number of private schools that came up over the same period was 11 times that number – 96,416. Eleven times. Let that sink in. Government schools are set up to adhere to fixed norms of a school in every locality. Private schools, on the other hand, come up in response to demand. If you want evidence of that, look at Kingdon’s data. Enrolment in government schools declined by 18,321,143 between 2010-11 and 2015-16. In private schools, for the same period, it increased by 17,045,725. What’s more, the number of government schools with less than 50 students increased from 313,169 (around 30 percent of all government schools) in 2010-11 to 417,193 (around 40 percent of all government schools) in 2016-17. So did the number of government schools with zero students – from 4,435 to 6,714. The response to this in many states has been to shut down government schools or consolidate them, giving rise to laments about the government withdrawing from education or, worse, privatising it by stealth. The Delhi government’s response has been to invest in improving them. Now, there is nothing wrong in that or in trying to woo middle-class children to government schools. Competition is always good. But competition should be on a level playing field. Unfortunately, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (the Right to Education or RTE Act) skews the playing field against the private schools and towards government schools. Private schools not meeting infrastructure and input norms specified in the Act either don’t get recognition or have to pay a penalty of Rs one lakh as well as Rs 10,000 per day. However, only 6.4 percent of government schools meet these recognition norms. That makes no difference to the remaining 93.6 percent. Because government schools are exempt from recognition requirements. Is it not time to rethink these input-oriented norms which, as this _Firstpost_ article pointed out, hit budget schools hard? A recent report by the Centre for Civil Society and EdelGive Foundation points out that 86 percent of students from families with income between Rs 9,000 and Rs 20,000 a month go to these schools. Is it not time to give private schools more autonomy? The best way to address the fear of exploitation by these schools is to lower entry barriers, which are many, especially for budget schools. The inevitable riposte to any argument for ending government’s near-monopoly in education (government schools have a 75 percent share) is: but what about the duty of the state to provide free and compulsory education? The debate about whether primary education is a public good or not will perhaps never be resolved, but even if we concede it is, can there not be some other way of providing it? The charter of demands of the National Coalition for School Education includes one for a school voucher programme - to give parents a voucher for Rs 2,500 which they can use to send their child to private schools. The amount may not meet the entire expenditure of a budget private school but will cover a big chunk of the cost. Is India ready for a school voucher programme? It’s not clear yet. There has perhaps been only one small experiment in Delhi by the Centre for Civil Society. There will be implementation challenges. There will be several knotty issues that will need to be unravelled. But it is time to start engaging with the idea. Why not have some states do pilot programmes to see whether or not, and how, it will work? The current method of delivering primary education is not yielding the desired results. It needs to change. The budget private schools report says that around 350 million children in the 0-14 years age group will entire the school system by 2031. They deserve better. The role of the government in education has to be drastically recast. There needs to be a serious debate on this. The author is a senior journalist. She tweets at @soorpanakha