The very idea of making money in a sector that is innately construed to be charitable and altruistic in India sends shivers down the backs of regulators, parents and thought-leaders in the country.
At a time when India is widely regarded as passing through a revolution in its education sector, the stubborn mind-set against private entrepreneurs benefiting from a sector that is parched for their innovative ideas and their healthy investments sounds bizarre.
Yet, despite government prepared reports underscoring the benefits of private schools over shoddy government schools, and half-hearted attempts by the government to open schools to profit-making investors, India today remains closed to those wanting to make money, pay taxes and educate its millions.
As regulators in India mull over the future of their education system and how best to prepare it for the 21st century, it would do them good to cast an eye towards the UAE, a country that is witnessing an education reformation of its own, and the investor-friendly, forward thinking policies there that have allowed the seeds of positive education reform to be sown in the country.
Like India, the UAE has been plagued by how to repair its public education system, improve teacher training standards and build scale in its higher education sector. Over the past few years, the government has responded to these challenges by adopting a more investor friendly policy; essentially, allowing the operation of for-profit schools and colleges alongside government run institutions, and crafting special regulations to allow foreign institutes to setup base in the country.
The idea has been to create an environment where private schools compete among themselves to provide the best possible education at the lowest cost, much like how restaurants compete to serve the tastiest food at reasonable prices. The government acts more as an enabler, setting basic standards of operation for schools and creating the necessary infrastructure needed by schools to operate.
The decision by reputed universities such as New York University and Paris’s Sorbonne to locate to the UAE, the growth in the number of schools in the country and the setting up of much needed vocational education colleges in areas such as Dubai Knowledge Village can be attributed to such investor friendly policies.
The positive effect these schools and colleges will have in educating both the local and expat population as well as in arresting a brain-drain from the UAE is sizeable.
On the other hand, India has adopted what it claims is a more child friendly policy, with the government not only disallowing profit making but also dictating terms to privately run schools’ daily operations. The recently ratified Right to Education Act, which requires private schools to enroll low-income students at highly subsidized fees is an example of such interference.
Despite being advertised as benefiting the common man, such policies are to the detriment of India’s long term aspirations as an educational powerhouse for a few reasons.
Firstly, it is no secret in India today that despite being legally coined as not-for-profit, education entrepreneurs in the country use complex structures and underhanded methods to remove a few bucks for themselves. The use of hefty capitation fees in schools and colleges in India, something many Indian expats in UAE are forced to pay for their children’s education back home, is an example of such a structure created to remove money from a system that does not legally allow profit-making.
Would it not be better to allow people who are passionate about education reform to make money legally as is the case in the UAE instead of letting cronies exploit parents through capitation fees?
Moving on, the Indian government is known to be a terrible operator of schools, with teacher absenteeism and poor infrastructure the norm in low-income areas. UNESCO ranks places India’s public education system one of the lowest in the world today. An innovative idea in the UAE to tackle a similar underperformance of public schools was to lease out a few government schools in Abu Dhabi to private, for-profit operators to manage.
Would it not be better for India as well to empower entrepreneurs to repair the messy public education system and also set up low-cost private schools?
Finally, just as it was in the UAE, parents in India are worried about high tuition fees, poor teaching quality and inferior student performance. In India’s current pseudo-socialist education system, the government is responsible for overseeing education quality, even in private schools, and sets its own benchmarks for schools to adhere to. In the UAE, where schools compete for profits, there is an automatic pressure on them to provide excellent quality education or risk losing their students to another, better performing school. Wouldn’t such a system offer India a win-win situation for schools, parents and regulators?
Despite a societal mindset against profit-making in educational institutes, India must recognize, like the UAE, that its goal of a child friendly education system is heavily reliant on how private investors and entrepreneurs are treated in the country—as empowered teachers or as bullied students.
Mayank Maheshwari is an entrepreneur and freelance writer based in Dubai, UAE. He serves as a senior committee member for the Hope Hall Foundation School in New Delhi.
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