Education in India

Madrassas in India

An op-ed in The Hindu (that appeared in May 2003) provides a good overview of the Madrassas in India tracing their evolution, their role in the past and the present, and challenges for the future.

Educational Subcontracting - a model from the British colonial period in India

I happened on an article titled Educational "Subcontracting" and the Spread of Religious Nationalism: Hindu and Muslim Nationalist Schools in Colonial India which provides some information on the education policy of the British in India during the 1800s and early 1900s. The author describes the British policy of focussing on (Indian) private-sector provision of primary education after 1854, with British subsidies being widely distributed to private Indian schools, which the author claims was central to the replacement of more traditional forms of education with Western-style ones.

The article suggests

Colonial powers that dedicated any resources to education at all often attempted to build education systems on the cheap through a process of educational "subcontracting," in which schools run by local groups were afforded state subsidies if they met state educational regulations regarding matters such as the age of students, the training of teachers, and the content of curriculum. Building an educational system through "subcontracting" could have powerful implications for the construction of various types of nationalist identities because it provided private groups advocating such identities with unprecedented resources, which could make their construction of extended school systems economically viable.

and examines the case of a group whose state-supported schools did just that — the Arya Samaj, a Hindu religious reform movement founded in 1875 in north India, which runs the DAV group of educational institutions. The article also describes another similar example of a Muslim reform movement, Muhammadiya, started in 1912 in Indonesia, which also benefited similarly from state subsidies from the colonial Dutch government.

It is interesting to note that the "Subcontracting" model has been around from as far back as the 1800s. The recent charter school model in North America is doing very much the same thing as are many state governments in India which provide state subsidies to many schools run by private trusts.