India’s dilemma in 2021: Pursue private education or ensure public education for all

There has been a weakening of the public sector since the mid1970s. It has been argued that it is inherently inefficient. This has led to a wave of privatization and promotion of markets everywhere. Where markets did not exist, they were created. The role of the state was redefined as ‘market-friendly state intervention’.

Following this philosophy, resources were withdrawn from the public sector and concessions were given to the private sector to help it advance. This move towards market-based functioning and retreat of the state was applied with disastrous consequences to two noble sectors—education and healthcare. This has proved to be detrimental to the wider interest of society and is now visible during the pandemic.

It is hard to value these two services. How much should a teacher or a doctor be paid? What should be the fee for a procedure at a hospital or the tuition fee charged from a student in an educational institution? If society pays more to the schoolteacher, the tuition fee would be higher. Poorly qualified teachers could accept a low salary but the quality would suffer. If one wished to have highly qualified teachers, they would have to be paid a high salary and the cost of education would go up. But that would rule out most of the poor and the middle class from such education and a subsidy would be required.

Similarly, in the case of healthcare, if one paid the doctors and other staff high consultation fees, the hospital charges would be high. If hospitals required doctors to recommend expensive tests that are not needed, the hospital bill would be high. If the doctors called in consultants to look at a patient even if they were not needed, the bill would go up. As a result, in the private sector, to make a profit, there are high bills for medical treatment and high tuition fees in educational institutions. This has resulted in a growing social divide in healthcare and education.

In most countries, the move for privatization starting in the late 1970s was accompanied by reduced funding for public-sector institutions; so, their quality deteriorated. The elite sections of society moved to the private sector and later to institutions in advanced countries. In a vicious cycle, this led to further segmentation and deterioration of the public sector institutions.

Education is crucial to the future of any nation. But it had to be shut down, since it required a lot people to be in close proximity. Also, children could not be expected to be very careful about physical distancing and hygiene. So, even though it is said that proportionately fewer children and younger people are prone to the disease, they can pass it on to the older generation. So, the reopening of schools and colleges closed since March was uncertain in spite of unlock.

Syllabi could not be completed and exams had to be postponed repeatedly—and, in many cases, cancelled. The start of the new educational session or new admissions also faced uncertainty and postponement. Most parents have not wanted to take a chance with sending their children to schools and colleges. So, both new admissions and the beginning of the new term were disturbed. All in all, the education sector is floundering.

Institutions have tried to innovate by holding classes via the Internet, making course material available to students and so on. But this has not been satisfactory, since in a poor country such as India, many households do not even have electricity, let alone the Internet, computers and smartphones. Some children committed suicide because they could not attend classes and were afraid of falling behind. Thus, the digital divide is showing up, with the poor getting deprived of education. This, over time, will result in a deeper social divide and greater inequality.

Parents have had to play an important role in motivating their children at home to attend classes via the Internet. So, the parents’ own literacy level, motivation and availability has become crucial. Poor families have found it difficult to find the time to do all this, since they have to go out to work. Even many middle-class families, where both spouses work, have faced difficulty.

That is why in the West it is being argued that if the economy is to unlock, schools have to open so that children can go there during the day, freeing parents from the duty of taking care of them so that they can go to work.

In education, henceforth, the public sector will have to play a more important role. With a large number of workers losing their incomes, their children will not be able to go to private schools, where the fees are higher. That will be true for many middle-class families as well. Many will have to consider sending their children to government schools rather than to private ones that they were attending till now.

In higher education, a lot of private institutions have mushroomed over the past thirty years. To make a profit (indirectly) they charge high fees. Even in public-sector institutions there has been a proliferation of ‘paying’ courses. An impoverished population will not be able to afford to send their children to these institutions, so enrolment and, in turn, profits will drop, and some of them may close down or will have to charge even higher fees.

Overall, demand will shift towards public-sector institutions and the government will have to be ready to increase the budget for public education. As society unlocked, holding classes with physical distancing became an issue. Online classes, as argued above, made the deprived sections lose out due to lack of electricity and wireless infrastructure. So, this infrastructure will have to be provided by the public sector to make it freely available.

Better-trained teachers will be required to teach in new ways and will have to be paid more than other competing jobs. This will be feasible only if society prioritizes education more than it has done till now. For the new mode of teaching, course content will have to be compressed and explained better so it can hold students’ interest. The young have a short attention span and within that time the teacher has to get an idea across to them.

Unfortunately, most teaching in the country, at all levels, is of poor quality, with children expected to learn by rote and mechanically pass exams. That is why most students and teachers are opposed in principle to open-book exams. This attitude will have to change in the distance-learning mode via the Internet. Good teaching is all about getting across the basics to the students and then expecting them to develop an interest in learning about the concepts further. Education will require a rethink.

The National Education Policy 2020 was announced on 29 July 2020, but it did not factor in the concerns thrown up by COVID-19, as discussed above. In brief, this sector has seen a decline in its contribution to the GDP, and technology has been playing a greater role. But this will have to confront the issue of the technology divide that aggravates inequality between the haves and the have-nots. Perhaps the time has come to go for neighbourhood schools and other such innovations.

(The author is an economist who taught at JNU for three decades. Excerpts from his book on the effect of the pandemic on the Indian economy)