In the churn of what we call democracy in India, children’s right to an equitable education has never been posed as a political claim on the state.
The CJP’s ‘SchoolThikKaro’ campaign has drawn attention to the old and persistent neglect of government schools. Following soon after their Jantar Mantar protest, which led to the union education minister’s resignation, it gave the young, including school children, a sense that they would be heard. It isn’t as if school children had not protested the conditions of their schools before. An internet search throws up tens of unique events across the country in the last decade.
The difference now is that every protest or school audit appears to be part of something bigger – not merely one school’s demand for the missing subject teacher or textbooks, for clean toilets or a healthy school lunch or for action against an abusive teacher or against the transfer of a much-loved one.
In this moment, one might be forgiven for thinking that school students, not yet of an age to vote, were making a political claim on the state – for their right to an equitable education. It’s a right guaranteed by law, but has not been part of political party campaigns and bizarrely has never figured on the list of voting parents’ expectations.
Until the CJP’s campaign focused attention on schools, it was ASER’s annual (now two-yearly) report that received momentary attention. ASER and the NGO Pratham presented their findings of a home-based survey of children’s “learning levels” to a packed hall in central Delhi. Every successive report revealed that learning levels – reading and math at ‘grade level’ – were abysmal. The media, with essentially only a voyeuristic interest in poorly run government schools, duly reported this finding.
While ASER/Pratham are the most prominent, their data constantly repeated by government advisors, international agencies, Nobel prize-winning economists, etc., the government has had its own periodic surveys. First, the National Assessment Survey and now, Parakh. They arrived at the same conclusion: children’s learning levels are abysmal.
Neither ASER nor the government’s surveys tell us whether a child who could not read or subtract went to school every day, whether they had teachers, whether the teachers were in school, whether the teacher was properly educated and trained for that school, whether the school language was their language, whether there was sufficient light in the classroom, whether there were classrooms, whether they went to school hungry, whether the school meal was good, whether they were being bullied, whether the teacher discriminated against them, whether they needed glasses, whether they had a learning disability…the list is long.
This was the pinnacle of a well-funded education ecosystem organised around measuring “output” and selling quick fixes to “close the learning gap”. Pratham, for example, promoted an intervention it calls TaRL (‘teaching at the right level’ – usually a term used for good classroom practice). Pratham’s TaRL is a remedial intervention which claims to quickly bring children up to speed.
While Pratham, and every other NGO that has worked in government schools, claims to have impacted millions of school children (a claim that is essential to an NGO’s financial survival), there is no independent evidence of any intervention making a significant, sustainable, transformative difference to how children learn or are taught in these schools.
Currently, dozens of NGOs and consultants are in the midst of delivering foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) materials, modules, on-the-job teacher training, etc. to government school systems in line with the latest education policy, just as they did a couple of decades ago for minimum learning levels (MLL) and not so long ago for Learning Outcomes. What underpins this vast and growing ecosystem of educationwalas – advisors, foundations, consultants, NGOs, social entrepreneurs, resource persons, trainers, interns, researchers, surveyors, report writers, journalists – is an education policy that is premised on equality.
In principle, all children, so long as they don’t drop out, have the same number of years in school and, in schools affiliated to the same board, have the same school calendar, the same curriculum and syllabus, the same textbooks and of course, the same exams. Mindless exams that India defines as an education.
On paper, a child from a family with multiple generations of literacy or formal education, and/or whose parents pay several lakhs of rupees per year in fees, private tuitions and other costs, and a child in a rural government school like the ones the CJP’s ‘SchoolThikKaro’ campaign has been auditing, whose parents have little education and no means, technically receive the ‘same’ education.
Over the decades the best among the educationwalas have pointed out this fallacy of equality of education, which is the foundation on which the meritocracy myth rests. But their bread and butter involves finding fixes that might make things a little less bad for the worst off, who are in government schools, but will not actually transform the system. They work with the hope that every little counts.
The honest truth is that children in government schools of the sort we have seen in the CJP and CJP-inspired videos and reels are from families who simply do not have the ability to send their children to any type of private school. The CJP says that rural schools educate “children of farmers and labourers” – it would be more accurate to say children of subsistence farmers and seasonal labourers.
Even in most urban areas, when families pick government schools it is a choice based on affordability. We saw this play out in most states during the COVID-19 years when many families lost jobs/incomes and government school enrolments increased, temporarily.
The common sense is that government schools are just bad and that the best parents with any means at all can do for their children is pay for private school. There are private schools for every price point, from Rs 100 per child per month to Rs 1,00,000 per child per month. The majority of children in the more economically advanced peninsular states are in private school.
Even in states like Uttar Pradesh, nearly half of all children are educated privately. West Bengal is an outlier in this respect with more than 80% of children in government-funded schools. But West Bengal is also a state with probably the most significant per child spending on private tuitions from primary school on.
India’s tiny English-speaking elite was always educated in private schools set up by community, private or religious trusts. But for the children of this class, whose parents worked in the central government or armed forces, the state created the Kendriya Vidyalayas (KV).
Now largely abandoned by the ‘officer class’, the KVs are still among the best resourced schools in the country – and in terms of quality, a cut above the vast majority of private and government schools. They defy common sense, showing that not all government schools are bad. The KVs are a testament to the fact that government can run good schools, when it chooses to.
So why do governments not run good schools? Because politicians and civil servants who run the government education system see them as schools for the poor. Their own children attend private school. In fact, almost everyone in the education administration and everyone working in government schools sends their children to private school.
The tragic irony is that even the Right to Education Act 2009, which guarantees the right of every child to elementary education and sets the norms for school education, reinforces the view that private is better. The Act provides an exit from government schools via a lottery-based 25% quota in private schools for children from “economically weaker sections”!
So long as government schools, of which rural primary schools are a subset, remain schools for the poor, nothing substantive will change. A campaign like the CJP’s may see an improvement in buildings, toilets, and the mid-day meal, but it will not in and of itself stop families exiting the system the moment they feel they can afford to.
The school students who sat on dharna after the CJP started the Jantar Mantar protest were not all from rural primary schools. Some were from their state’s model government school – selective, better-resourced model schools that almost every state has. Their schools were not in crumbling buildings or lacking toilets. They were short of teachers.
The common sense is that government school teachers are “absent”. In many schools they are. And absent for a variety of reasons. In some schools there is an absence of teachers because not enough have been appointed. The bureaucratic norm for teacher appointments to government primary schools is curiously based on the number of children (1 teacher for 30 children) and not the number of classes the children are in, although schools are organised not as mixed-age classes, but classes graded by age.
In some schools, teachers – class teachers and subject teachers – are absent, although they are marked present, because they are on “duty” as BLOs for the Election Commission or enumerators for the census. This form of absence, on ‘official duty’, is actually mandated by the Right to Education Act!
Apart from the KVs, and the more recent residential Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, which are administered by autonomous societies set up by the union government, government schools are administered by the departments of education of each state. While it would be logical to think that the ministry or department exists because it has schools to run, these schools are effectively the lowest administrative unit of the administration.
The secretary of the department of school education, usually from the IAS, sits at the top of the pyramid and the principals or head teachers of government schools at the bottom. It is common practice that when an education department bureaucrat visits a school, the school principal vacates their chair for the bureaucrat! School teachers, it goes without saying, are among the lowest rung of department employees.
Communication in government schools is in one direction. The department instructs and, as in any bureaucracy, the lowest rung must defer and deliver. All school education secretaries know that that is not the power balance in private schools, because their own children go to private schools. In private schools, at every price point, the school and principal set the terms.
The vast majority of families who exit government schools for private schools have a choice of ‘affordable’ or ‘budget’ schools – in cramped buildings, no open spaces and with grandiose names. The schools have benches, toilets, a teacher in every classroom, and are English medium in the local language. What parents pay for, apart from school fees, books, uniforms, any extra-curriculars, transport, and after-school tuition, is the social cachet of “private”. But are the children learning?
The evidence is no more than average. The teachers in budget/affordable schools earn budget/affordable wages. Very few would make the cut for a government school. They are themselves usually products of poor education, and reproduce in schools a version of their own poor school experience.
Teaching is rarely a first-choice profession for most school teachers, especially men. And, government or private, the majority of them are formed by their social milieu and limited by their own prior education. Twelve years of poor schooling, a low-quality undergraduate degree, topped by a farcical BEd, often a piece of paper purchased from a shop that passes for a college, and you can be a teacher in a private school. It is a wee bit harder to get through the qualification tests for government schools.
There is some evidence that the majority who get through the Teacher Eligibility Tests have B.Ed. degrees from government or government-aided teacher education institutions. TET, like most such exams, is more a test of exam-taking ability than of aptitude for the job. And the limited research on the subject suggests that those who qualify scrape through with poor to mediocre grades.
As in any profession, there is a percentage of teachers who, despite all odds, rise to the challenge. By any estimation such teachers are a small minority. No amount of in-service training can remedy a lack of passion and empathy combined with a bad education. But, so far, it is the only thing on offer.
Public conversations on children’s education are dominated by student assessments. Professional engagement with teachers is dominated by trying to find workarounds for the limitations of government teachers. For decades active discrimination in government school classrooms was explained away as “social distance” – the distance created between teacher and taught by the teachers’ social prejudices. “Sensitising” teachers to caste, gender and disability was the chosen solution, as if a few training modules could suppress deep-seated casteism, gender or disability bias and engender genuine empathy.
It was a no-no to ask why a teacher’s own children should not be in the school they worked in. That would be denying them democratic choice. The children, taught by teachers who consider them unworthy classmates for their own daughters and sons and the schools too horrible to educate them, have no choice. In the meanest of private schools a paying parent, paying as much as every other parent, also buys a way out of “social distance” and a level of equal treatment for their child.
In the churn of what we call democracy in India, children’s right to an equitable education has never been posed as a political claim on the state. Twenty-odd years ago a coalition of NGOs propelled the Right to Education Act, which fell well short of guaranteeing equity.
In the 20 years since the law was enacted, school education has become vastly more inequitable, apart from becoming vastly more mindless. It is a race to board exams and entrance exams where success is secured by ability to pay. The traditional elites and the new rich tut-tut about the quality of school education, but they have no incentive to change a system that is fixed in their favour. They can now also opt out completely – with foreign school boards and foreign universities.
What the CJP’s ‘SchoolThikKaro’ campaign has been doing is giving voice to the unrepresented – government school children whose lives are circumscribed by their families’ inability to pay. There are, however, also vast numbers of children in cut-price private schools, taught by teachers with cut-price degrees, crammed into tight spaces and cramming in languages they do not actually understand. Together they are the majority of school children in India. The ‘Future of India’. Not yet voters, they have no means of making a direct political claim on the state.
The CJP campaign holds the promise of a possibility. It is not just a chance for India to hold governments to account for the minimum they are mandated to provide at present – buildings, toilets, teachers, but also to question the model of education: a fixed race in which a majority of children are not even at the start line. That has to change. What India needs are schools for all, not schools for the poor.
This article went live on September fourteenth, two thousand twenty six, at thirty-five minutes past three in the afternoon.
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