Budget Private Schools to the Rescue?

As India goes from trying to upgrade its government-funded educational institutions to better regulating the private institutions that it has allowed to prosper, there still remains a large section of the population who go largely unaffected by all of this, and unfortunately, largely uneducated as a result of this. Enter Budget Private Schools, and the entrepreneurship that is slowly changing the way that education is made affordable and worthwhile for the poorer sections of India’s population. Roughly defined as being those institutions that charge a monthly tuition fee not in excess of the daily wage the average labourer gets, these kinds of institutions have been popping up all over rural India, fuelled by the entrepreneurial spirit that as gripped many of India’s city-dwellers, trying to find more meaning in the work that they do and how it impacts the country.

Rampant truancy by teaching staff, and attempts to earn both salary and tuition fees for taking extra classes on the side are a couple of the issues that have long plagued the Indian education system, particularly those of the government schools. In fact, in some cases, it was discovered that many students who had managed to advance to higher grades were not able to perform basic functions such as reading a paragraph of text, or completing basic arithmetic functions to arrive at an answer. Even though India boasts an adult literacy rate of above 71%, the truth of the matter is that there are many layers and interpretations to what really constitutes said literacy when one examines things a little more closely. This is precisely what budget private schools are able to address, and to do so in a manner that allows education to be affordable to the people, as well and more importantly as, being meaningful to them.