The second idea, that I talked about in my TED Talk titled Education for All - More of the Same or Something Different? on December 13th, 2010 at TEDx Kumaun is another policy change - to open up education to for-profit entities.
Today, by law, only the government or non-profit charitable trusts can run schools in India. Those in the educational policy establishment believe that a just society must provide state-funded and state-delivered education for all children for free and the private sector has no role to play. They are ideologically against for-profit education and believe that it is simply wrong to make a profit from education.
Another argument against private delivery of education is that all the major developed countries in the West educated their children almost entirely through public schools and so we must do the same. But to put that argument in perspective, we need to understand that all those countries had much smaller school-going populations to educate during their respective growth phases and more importantly they all had the luxury of time to be able to gradually bring different sections of society under the ambit of public schooling over decades. Today in India, we face challenges and circumstances that are very different from what the developed countries faced then. We have a school-age population that is many times that of the developed countries and we want to educate all of the children within the next five years, going by our current target of achieving education for all by 2015.
Having failed to educate all our children for the past 60 years through Government and non-profit schools alone, despite repeatedly setting targets, a good part of two generations of children have lost out on getting an education. If we had somehow been able to educate every child back in 1960 (the target that we set ourselves in 1950), India could have been in far better shape today in terms of the economy, society and as a result the polity as well.
We ought not to be dogmatic anymore by continuing to insist on education being run only by Government and non-profit entities. It is time to consider opening up education to for-profit entities and co-opting the private sector to help us achieve the national goal of educating every single child quickly.
Opening up education to for-profit entities should not be seen through an ideological lens. It is not a change of ideological stance from the Government as the ideal provider to that of not wanting a leading role for the Government and favouring the private sector as the panacea for everything. It is more a matter of pragmatism at this point of time to ensure we are able to address the national goal in a time-bound manner, through all means available, public and private, non-profit and for-profit. If we refuse to be pragmatic, we will be condemning a large part of yet another generation of children to a life without education or opportunity.
We have successfully co-opted the private sector to meet national goals in other sectors like telecom, housing, power, roads and health where for-profit companies are well accepted and are playing an important role. Without the help of the private sector's contribution in drastically expanding supply and improving quality in these sectors, we couldn't have provided these services to the hitherto unreached on such a large scale in such a short time. Although we have made progress, we still have a long way to go in providing these services to a large segment of the population. Issues like profiteering, corruption and poor quality of service by both Government and Private players do crop up in these sectors from time to time. We have put in place regulators who are tasked with addressing these issues and ensuring quality and preventing malpractices and the regulators will get better and better over time. The Private and the Government sectors have shown that they can work in tandem to achieve the national goals in these sectors in short periods of time.
It is time we did the same in the Education sector too. We must experiment with opening up education to for-profit entities to complement the efforts of the Government and non-profit sectors. Along with implementing the RSBY model in education, if we open up education to for-profit entities, and regulate them effectively, the anticipated increase in both Government and private investment in education can help us scale dramatically and achieve our goal of providing a quality education to every single child in the country at least by 2020.
How do we build support for these policy changes? That brings me to the third idea that I spoke about in my TED Talk - the need for political innovation to make education a top political priority, with attendant electoral gains.
