[Dec 2007, Volume 4 Quarterly Issue] Pdf File size - The IIPM Think ...

MORE MARKETS, LESS GOVERNMENT
Or a husband and wife team starts a
school as a joint business, seeing the
success of other schools in the neighbourhood.
Visit these schools, and
you’ll find the vast majority of teachers
present and teaching, and a vibrant atmosphere
of learning taking place.
And the market for these schools seems
huge: I first discovered for myself these
low cost private schools in poor areas
of the Old City of Hyderabad a few
years back. From the roof of one, I
could see five or six other private
schools, all vying for the same customers.
‘More Market, Less Government’
in education already seemed to be the
impulse of poor parents across India.
How many schools are there? What
proportion of children are they serving?
How good are these low cost private
schools? What is their business
model – and does it have implications
for the way the sector can be enhanced?
These were the questions that leapt out
at me when I first found these schools
for myself. I procured funding from
the John Templeton Foundation to
conduct detailed research – in India,
and also in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and
China, for the phenomenon of low cost
private schools turns out to be something
that is widespread across the developing
world. My research teams
explored selected, officially designated
‘poor’ areas, such as slums and shanty
towns in metropolitan cities in these
countries, and poor areas in the rural
hinterlands surrounding these cities.
They researched remote villages in impoverished
North-West China, and
rural communities in south India. The
teams combed these poor areas, going
down every alleyway in the slums, visiting
every settlement in the rural areas,
asking of people on market stalls and
in the streets, to find where the poor
were being educated. They found large
numbers of schools – 918 in the ‘notified’
slums of three zones of Hyderabad,
India, for instance.
What the research teams found
points to an extraordinary grassroots
educational revolution that is taking
place – in India and across the developing
world. In poor urban areas surveyed,
a large majority of school children
were found to be in ‘budget’
private schools. For instance, in the
slums of Hyderabad, India, 65 percent
of schoolchildren were in private unaided
schools. These schools charge
very low fees, affordable to parents on
poverty-line and minimum-wages. In
Hyderabad, mean monthly fees at 4th
grade were Rs.78.17 ($1.74) in unrecognized
and Rs.102.55 ($2.28) in recognized
private schools in the slums –
about 4.2 percent and 5.5 percent
respectively of the monthly wage for a
breadwinner on a typical minimum
wage of about Rs.78/-per day (Government
of India, 2005, assuming 24 working
days per month).
Private schools for the poor are not
just an urban phenomenon either. In
the deprived district of Mahbubnagar,
in Andhra Pradesh, I found around
three-fifths of schools were government,
only a tiny number private aided,
and well over a third were private unaided.
But breaking these figures into
schools in the small towns and rural
areas proper, I could see that small
town Andhra Pradesh is rather similar
to the metropolitan areas: Just as in
urban Hyderabad, the vast majority of
schools – nearly two-thirds – were private
unaided in the small towns of
Mahbubnagar. In the rural areas proper,
however, government schools were
in a majority – around fourth-fifths,
with private unaided schools making
up the remaining fifth. Development
experts who are aware of the existence
of this low cost private sector appear
uniformly to worry about their low
quality: The Oxfam Education Report,
for instance, notes that private schools
for the poor are of ‘inferior quality’,
offering ‘a low-quality service’ that will
In Hyderabad, mean monthly fees at 4th grade were
Rs. 78.17 ($1.74) in unrecognized and Rs.102.55 ($2.28)
in recognized private schools in the slums – about 4.2
percent and 5.5 percent respectively of the monthly wage
for a breadwinner on a typical minimum wage
‘restrict children’s future opportunities.’
(Watkins, 2000, p. 230). Nambissan
(2003) notes that in Calcutta, ‘the
mushrooming of privately managed
unregulated pre-primary and primary
schools… can have only deleterious
consequences for the spread of education
in general and among the poor in
particular’ (p. 52), for the quality of the
private schools is ‘often suspect’ (p. 15,
footnote 25). Significantly, such concerns
about low quality of private provision
must be read in the context of
THE INDIA ECONOMY REVIEW
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