Write short note: Privatisation of Education and Equality of Opportunity. (2004)
Privatisation of education has three distinct faces: privatisation of provision (private unaided schools and colleges), of financing (households paying fees, coaching and transport for a service the state promises free), and of the public institution itself (self-financing courses, contract teaching, corporate partnerships). Equality of opportunity presumes that educational outcomes should not track the purchasing power of the family. Privatisation makes them track it directly — which is why the two stand in tension.
The Indian scale
- Private unaided schools crossed 40 per cent of school enrolment in 2025-26 (up from 38.8 per cent the previous year), while government schools fell to 48.1 per cent; 71.4 per cent of pre-primary children are already in private institutions.
- The Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education, 2025 puts average annual household expenditure per student at ₹2,863 in government schools against ₹25,002 in private ones — nearly a ninefold gap. 95 per cent of educational costs are borne by households and only 1.2 per cent met by government scholarships.
- Shadow education has become structural: 27 per cent of students take private coaching, rising to 30.7 per cent in urban India.
Why it erodes equality of opportunity
- Education becomes a positional good. Fred Hirsch (Social Limits to Growth, 1976) showed that goods valued for relative standing cannot be equalised by expansion; when schooling is bought, spending simply escalates and the poor stay behind the front rank.
- Parallel circuits of schooling. A stratified system — elite English-medium, low-fee private, and residual government — sorts children by class before it examines them. Pierre Bourdieu identified the mechanism: schools reward the cultural capital families already possess and call it merit.
- Exit of the articulate. As officials, professionals and the salaried middle class withdraw their own children from government schools, the political constituency demanding quality in them disappears, and the common school ceases to be a shared public concern.
- Language and coaching as gatekeepers. English medium and paid test preparation convert household income into examination rank, so a formally identical entrance test produces socially patterned results.
The other side, and the safeguards
Private entry has genuinely expanded provision where the state defaulted, and low-fee private schools serve many poor households. But the learning advantage narrows sharply once family background is controlled, and government schools have been improving — ASER 2024 found 23.4 per cent of Class 3 children in government schools able to read a Class 2 text, up from 16.3 per cent in 2022. The regulatory answer has been to attach public obligations to private provision: Section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act, 2009 reserves 25 per cent of entry-class seats for disadvantaged children, and in January 2026 the Supreme Court directed authorities to frame rules under Section 38 to enforce it, warning that the mandate would otherwise remain “a dead letter”.
Conclusion
Privatisation does not abolish equality of opportunity; it relocates it from a right of citizenship to a function of household budgets. The Education Commission (1964-66) understood this when it proposed a Common School System. Until comparable public schooling exists, expanding private provision will keep enlarging access while sharpening inequality of opportunity.