PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP FOR QUALITY EDUCATION IN
INDIA
He, who opens a school door, closes a prison.
~Victor Hugo
Basic framework to be used here
In 1970, Albert O. Hirschman, wrote a treatise named Exit,
Voice and Loyalty in which he explained what a consumer generally do when
she meets a waning quality of goods or services. The rudimentary
notion is: “members
of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human
grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the
organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member:
they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice
(attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the
complaint, grievance or proposal for change)”.
Theorizing educational establishment analogous to 'Exit' and 'Voice' permits the scrutiny of how the role of the market and
civic influence the access to and standard of education.
Why need arose for partnership between Private
and Public Sector?
"A
poor surgeon hurts 1 person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130."
~Ernest Leroy
Boyer
It is well recognized that education is a precondition
for the progression and development of a modern and evenhanded socio-economic
order. It is indispensable for empowering and facilitating the poor to
participate more fully in a democratic polity that identifies parity of opportunity
as one of its esteemed objectives. For these reasons, education, especially
school education, is regarded as the obligation of the government and the enactment
of the Right to Education Act of late is a step in that direction. The challenges facing the state with regard to the
universal provision of education are becoming conspicuous in a number of areas.
Firstly, failure of state schools to provide adequate
and acceptable level of education has forced parents to go for alternatives,
either by exiting the system or by raising voice. Secondly, there
is a disparity between the quality of education provided by State and Non-state
players signifying the need for regulating the sector. Thirdly, there is a mounting
commercial interest in the educational sector with an upsurge in new providers
who are transmogrifying the topography of the education sector.
Second query that arises in mind is why government
schools are failing to provide quality education?
Findings of Muralidharan and Kremer (2006) and the
Pratham ASER report (2005) states that Private-school teacher salaries in rural
India are typically less than one-fifth the salary of regular public-school
teachers (and are often as low as one-tenth as much). This enables the private schools to hire more
teachers, have much lower pupil-teacher ratios, and reduce multi-grade
teaching. Teachers of private schools are 2-8 percentage points less absent
than teachers in public schools and 6-9 percentage points more likely to be
engaged in teaching activity at any given point in time. Combining the effects
of a lower pupil-teacher ratio and a higher level of teaching activity leads to
a child in a private school having 3-4 times more “teacher-contact time” than
in a public school in the same village. Private schools also start teaching
English significantly earlier, which is something that parents repeatedly say
they value in interviews. Finally,
children in private schools have higher attendance rates and superior test
score performance. However, despite the very low salaries, the private school
teachers are less absent and more likely to be engaged in teaching
activity. One reason for this is likely
to be that head teachers in private school are much more likely (and able) to
take disciplinary action against shirking teachers than their counterparts in
the public schools.
The indirect financial costs imposed by the state
schooling system, such as uniforms and extra private tuition (“if you have
to pass, then you must attend my tuition classes after school”), is another
major cause of exclusion of children from poor communities. Another related
cause is the expulsion of children from education due to their inability to
meet the demands of accreditation imposed by the State sector. The ‘voice’
action generally isn’t used as people don’t want to get into any mess especially
when lesser risky option of ‘exit’ is available. People don’t send their
children to a system; the unit that matters is school. The private schools then
come as a bolt hole.
Despite their superior performance, most of the
private schools are not getting recognitions as state authorities demanding
certain standards to be matched to get recognition in terms of greater teacher
salaries, higher teacher-student ratio and the likes. The much known
Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme was called off by state authorities even
after its outstanding performance by quoting issue of illegitimacy of space
occupied in a public territory is a concrete example of how the state regarded
the NGO not as an equal but a lesser entity in the provision of education and undermines
the position of the NGO.
The propensity of private institutions to regard local
feat as curiosity without envisioning a greater dream of social makeover has forestalled
any prolonged endeavour beyond the duration of a specific project. These are
some of the reasons why private and public players cannot transform the whole education
by working in seclusion.
The line of reasoning for these partnerships was to
bring in the management practices of the private sector into the public sector
and mend competitiveness and upturn efficacy. The understanding was that this
would make public disbursement more effective and in some cases would entice financial
investment from the private sector. Joint ventures in education have been obsessed
by the need for more finances to run under the weather school system not
counting the need to improve the quality of provision through hovering
management standards in schools.
The challenge for policy was, therefore, to mull over
ways by which the superior efficiency, suppleness, and culpability of the
private sector can be leveraged for improved educational upshot for all
children.
"I
had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed
teachers." ~Woody Allen
How to weave the fabric?
The
founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures
called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take
you and industry can't take you. ~John Updike, The Centaur
PPP is
already being espoused in several infrastructure development sectors, such as
the development of airports, railways, roads, and so on. But, going by media
reports, these have variegated aftereffects.
So what
should be the basic framework of such a partnership in case of education?
The state
and non-state players should know their roles individually. They should come
together, stitch things together in such a way that magnifies the impact. There
is no need to reinvent something new except a will to provide a quality
education to all. Feasible and ambitious goals should be set, accountability
should be ensured and steps should be taken slowly, smartly and steadily.
In Eleventh
Five Year Plan, PPP has been proposed as an important strategy in the case of
education. The concept of PPP as explained by Ministry
of HRD is:
“PPP in
school education is
essentially an arrangement
where the private sector partner
participates in the
provision of services traditionally
provided by the government.
It is usually
characterized by an agreement between
the government and the
private sector, with
the latter undertaking
to deliver an agreed
service on the
payment of a
unitary charge by
the government.”
The Plan has proposed the setting up
of 6,000 new model schools in secondary education, affiliated to the CBSE. Of
these, 2,500 are to be covered under the PPP model. The plan is to set up these
schools in the rearward regions and far-flung areas where decent schooling
facilities do not exist, so that quality education is accessible in the
backward regions as well.
According to the model finalised by the Planning Commission in
consultation with the private sector, these schools will be set up by 2014 and
will have the capacity to educate 65 lakh students, of whom 25 lakh will be
from the deprived sections. Each school will have about 2,500 students, 1,000
of whom will be from shabby sections and charged a nominal fee. Fifty per cent
of the 1,000 students will be from the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes
and the Other Backward Classes. They will be required to pay a monthly fee of
Rs.25 each. The rest of the children, who will be from other deprived sections
— non-income tax paying families — will be required to pay a fee of Rs.50 a month.
The remaining costs of these students, estimated to be Rs.1,000 to Rs.1,200 a
head per month, will be reimbursed by the Union government to the schools. It
is estimated that the government will have to pay Rs.10,500 crore until 2017.
The amount is likely to go up with escalating prices, in general, and
increasing costs of education, in particular.
Over and above this, the schools may get access to relevant funds
from the Centre and the State governments under different schemes. The schools
will be free to admit anyone to the remaining 1,500 seats and charge any amount
of fee.
Corporate companies with a minimum net worth of Rs.25 lakh are
eligible to set up schools under this model. Each entity should deposit Rs.50
lakh with the government for the first school it proposes to set up, and Rs.25
lakh per additional school. Each can set up as many as 25 schools. Non-profit
companies with prior experience in education need to deposit Rs.25 lakh for
each school. The schools will need to have the sort of infrastructure available
in the best private schools.
-The Hindu
Problems to be played against?
“Education
is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.” ~Aristotle
The development of this new form of establishment has heralded counsel
that developing countries might embark on these ventures to improve educational
access and quality in their school sector (Patrinos, 2005). However there are
concerns that the all set offering of this new model of education provision
might be expeditious at best and off beam at wickedest.
Firstly, because there has been an insufficient evaluation of the
public-private partnerships that have been established. What appraisal has been
undertaken indicates that the conjectural framework for PPPs is weak, for case
in point, the drawing together of public and private providers without due
regard about whether their objectives had considerable intersection or even an
element of scuffle raises doubts about the viability of such arrangements.
Also, it appears that political ideology and social policy played a momentous
role in carving partnerships and the clout of economic and educational
arguments in these models might be questionable (Common, 2000). A meticulous
and vigilant consideration of the economics and politics that lie beneath this
form of provision of education should be given for any prescription which is
meant for advancing the case of public-private partnership. Nevertheless, the
model has been put forward as a “panacea to ills of the Indian state school
system” by World Bank but this exercise must be undertaken within the context of the shifting
terrain of Indian education instead of a ‘one-size fits all’ approach.
Secondly, the non-state programmes that work with the government have
had varied experiences of the effectiveness and/or sustainability of such rendezvous
and often regard such nexus as a necessary but obnoxious requisite of their
work. The unwillingness of the state to relinquish its control over education
provision and to give way to non-state providers is regarded as a major
stumbling block. The engagements between state and non-state providers have
been circumscribed due to the low regard in which non-state providers are held.
The objective of PPP should be
to coalesce the respective potency of the public and private sectors to
complement each other in pursuit of the shared goal of good education for all.
In particular, adoption of the PPP mode would lead to rapid expansion of access
to world-class education by low-income families. To ensure inclusive
growth and an equitable socio-economic order, affirmative action is necessary
to accelerate the provision of quality education to those who have hitherto
lacked access.
“It'll be
a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to
hold a bake sale to buy bombers.“ ~ You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs
