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International schools: globally benchmarked K-12 education

has all but collapsed, especially in rural India which even widespread aversion to teaching English/Inglish, India’s
seven decades after independence still grudgingly hosts 60 link language and language of the courts, business and in-
percent of the country’s 1.40 billion population. According dustry. Therefore, most rural school-leavers either go back
to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of the to their small farms to scratch out a living or join the ranks
Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994), over 50 per- of the country’s estimated 140 million migrant labour ready
cent of (neglected and recklessly promoted) class VII chil- and willing to travel anywhere to toil for pitiful wages.
dren in rural India can’t read class II textbooks and solve Unsurprisingly, India’s estimated 55,000 private pre-
simple three by one digit division sums. schools and 450,000 private aided (teachers’ salaries paid
Pratham has been highlighting the growing illiteracy of by state governments) and independent (‘unaided’) K-12
rural India for over 25 years, to no avail. In the Union Bud- schools, which nurture 48 percent of the country’s 260 mil-
get 2024-25 presented to Parliament on February 1, the lion in-school children, provide superior quality education.
Central government’s allocation for public education was But it’s pertinent to note that 400,000 of them are budget
Rs.1.2 lakh crore, equivalent to 0.4 percent of GDP. The na- private schools (BPS) levying tuition fees of Rs.100-2,000
tional outlay (after the allocations of 29 state governments per month for providing primary-secondary education
and seven Union territories are added) has reportedly crept mainly to children from lower middle and working class
up to 4 percent of GDP. households. Usually under-capitalised mom and pop enter-
The damage of continuous under-funding of public prises, they can’t offer more than basic infrastructure and
education has been augmented by low quality teaching- don’t pay teachers well enough to attract high quality fac-
learning in India’s 1.20 million mainly state government ulty, with the result that children’s learning outcomes tend
schools. Twenty-five percent of over-paid government to be poor. Even so, because they claim to offer English-
school teachers in rural India are absent daily, i.e, 1.25 mil- medium instruction, low-income parents beg, borrow and
lion, and government schools are infamous for crumbling incur debt to enrol their children in neighbourhood BPS.
buildings, absence of libraries, laboratories and lavatories The total number of aided and unaided private primary-
and multigrade teaching in furniture-less classrooms. Vo- secondary schools providing acceptable quality education
cational and life skills education are unknown and there’s countrywide is estimated at a mere 50,000, of whom the

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