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India's Poor Bet Precious Sums on Private Schools
By AMY WALDMAN
 ANUA,
India — In this democracy of more than one billion people, an
educational revolution is under way, its telltale signs the small
children everywhere in uniforms and ties. From slums to villages, the
march to private education, once reserved for the elite, is on.
On the four-mile stretch of road between this village in Bihar State,
in the north, and the district capital, Hajipur, there are 17 private
schools (called here "public" schools).
They range from the Moonlight Public School where, for 40 rupees a
month, less than a dollar, 200 children learn in one long room that
looks like an educational sweatshop, to the DAV School, which sits
backed up to a banana grove and charges up to 150 rupees a month, or
more than $3. Eleven months after opening, it already has 600 students
from 27 villages.
There are at least 100 more private schools in Hajipur, a city of
300,000; hundreds more in Patna, the state capital; and tens of
thousands more across India.
The schools, founded by former teachers, landowners, entrepreneurs and
others, and often of uneven quality, have capitalized on parental
dismay over the even poorer quality of government schools. Parents say
private education, particularly when English is the language of
instruction, is their children's only hope for upward mobility.
Such hopes reflect a larger social change in India: a new certainty
among many poor parents that if they provide the right education,
neither caste nor class will be a barrier to their children's rise.
Even those with little cash to spare seek out these schools. Ram Babu
Rai, who farms less than an acre and earns about 1,000 rupees a month
($22), working part time, sends one of his three sons to a private
school here. Just sending one boy is a struggle, costing him 2,200
rupees a year ($49), including the 10-year-old's orange and navy blue
uniform.
"With my little means, I have to manage my family," Mr. Rai said. "But
still, I thought to spare some extra money for the boy, so he will do
well in life." A member of the cowherders' caste, Mr. Rai dreams that
his son will become a "big officer."
"Since ages, we are doing manual work," said Rehaman Sheik, 35, an
illiterate plumber in the Dharavi slum of Bombay. "Why should they?" he
said of his sons. "They should have a good profession."
To that end, he spends 400 rupees a month, just under $9, on school
tuition and extras like uniforms, out of monthly earnings of 3,000
rupees. He also spends 200 rupees monthly on tutoring, a phenomenon
common among parents of government and private school students alike.
To some, such expenditures by the poor represent a disgraceful
abdication by the state, one that creates a class system segregating
those with private, English-language education from those without.
"If anything should be free, it is primary education," said Amartya
Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. No developed country, whether
France or Japan, had educated itself using private schools, he noted.
A recent census in the slums of Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, found
that of 1,000 schools identified, two-thirds were private, according to
James Tooley, a professor at the University of Newcastle in England who
oversaw the research.
"In big cities, it's more or less over," an economist, Jean Drèze, who
helped write a national assessment of education in 1999, said of
government primary education, although rural students depend heavily on
government schooling. "Within 10 to 15 years, government schools will
be almost wiped out."
India's government has long devoted more attention and proportionally
more resources to higher education, which has helped it soar in
so-called knowledge industries.
But it has neglected elementary education. India spends only about 1.7
percent of gross domestic product on primary education, and 3.4 percent
for education overall (compared with about 5 percent for Brazil). Up to
40 million children are out of school, something the government hopes
will be remedied by a law passed in 2002 that made free and compulsory
education a fundamental right for children up to 14.
But the law did not address the quality of government schools, and
that, parents say, is the problem. At the Astipur government school
near here, the smallest children sit on a dirt floor in a room with no
blackboards, while others sit in a dirt passageway.
The school has no power, no working latrines and little teaching.
Teachers — well paid, by Indian standards, thanks to effective unions —
say they know how to "manage" the inspectors who come to check on their
attendance. Anyway, they are often called away for weeks at a time to
perform other duties for the state, such as updating electoral rolls,
conducting censuses, helping with antipolio campaigns or overseeing the
spraying of insecticide.
On a recent day, only about one-third of the students were present but
the classrooms were packed. If all of the 1,700 students enrolled
actually showed up, teachers said, the school could not accommodate
them.
These conditions are not unique to Bihar, often derided as a basket
case for its poor governance. The 1999 Public Report on Basic Education
in India found teaching activity under way in only about half the
schools visited in four northern states, including Bihar. Sixty-three
percent of the schools' roofs needed repair, only 11 percent had
working toilets and only 41 percent had drinking water.
So parents have come to believe that the only worthwhile education is the one they pay for.
Another explanation for the private school craze lies in the
ever-growing number of English coaching institutes — with names like
The British Lingua and BBC English — in small towns and cities alike.
In a globalizing India, said Vivek Razdan, 26, who runs one such
institute in Hajipur, teaching the difference between "what" and
"which" to candidates for the civil service, the military, graduate
business schools and more, everybody wants to learn English.
Yet Bihar's schools teach in Hindi, as do almost all government schools
in the north. Elsewhere, the teaching is usually in one of India's
regional languages. So private schools have learned that the best way
to lure parents inside is a sign saying "English medium," ideally with
a name out front like Cambridge or St. Paul's for an added Anglo-fillip.
In Bombay, government schools that teach in Marathi, the regional
language, have lost 30,000 students in the past three years, mostly to
private schools, according to city officials. The city has converted
about 40 schools to English medium in an attempt to retain students.
Bihar recently lowered to third grade, from sixth, the stage at which
it begins teaching English, and many states have similar accommodations.
Bihar's minister for primary education, Ram Chandra Poorve, defended
taking teachers from schools to perform duties like updating electoral
rolls, calling elections "the greatest festival of a democracy." He
attributed the rush to private schools to a "mad race" reflecting
parents' desire for status.
"Our schools might not be sophisticated, but they are very rooted with village culture," he said.
Many parents seem to want more for their children. "We have no love for
the government school, but we have no money," said Phul Kumar Devi, an
illiterate mother of four. "What do we do?"
Sometimes her children complained that their teachers were not
teaching. They begged her for private tutoring, which she could not
afford.
The Manua Primary School, which her sons attend, sits right next to the private Saraswati Shishu Vidya Mandey.
In the government school, only two of the three teachers assigned for
273 students were present on a recent day. Around 50 children sat on
the floor in a gloomy classroom, while 40 more sat on the grass
outside, as their classroom had been under repair since August. One
teacher did paperwork, while the other floated between the two groups,
not actually teaching either.
At the private school next door, where the teacher-student ratio is 1
to 25, a group of smartly uniformed children stood outside counting
loudly in English under their teacher's watchful eye. They then marched
in orderly single file into a classroom with blackboard and benches.
The children next door wrestled, and watched. Save 50% off home delivery of The Times
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