Marco Legal

Private school education is a rapidly expanding sector in India (Nambissan, 2010). The last two decades have seen an unprecedented and exponential growth of private schools across urban as well as rural areas (Kingdon, 2007; Scrase and Scrase, 2009). This has created a stratified and fragmented schooling system in the country, with differently resourced schools catering to different segments of the population, including a new category of low fee private schools catering to the poor (Majumdar 2005; Kingdon, 2007).

As evident from the following tables, the social landscape of schooling in the country as well as in Coimbatore district is highly inequitable.

Table 2.1: Distribution of schools in India across various categories and levels of schooling (Government of India, 2012)

Type of School Level of schooling Government including local bodies Private aided Private unaided Total number of schools Primary 706,368 (86%) 54,052 (7%) 62,742 (8%) 823,162 (100%) Upper primary 268,862 (73%) 39,258 (11%) 59,625 (16%) 367,745 (100%) Lower Secondary 49,486 (40%) 29,622 (24%) 44,618 (36%) 123,726 (100%) Higher Secondary 30,887 (46%) 11,953 (18%) 24,077 (36%) 66,917 (100%) Total 1,055,603 (76%) 134,885 (10%) 191,062 (14%) 1,381,550 (100%)

This following data is about school provisioning in urban areas in Coimbatore. This data is based on my calculations of district level primary data about town amenities in Tamil Nadu as recorded in Census 201113_.

13 _{See the Excel spreadsheets on Town Amenities in Tamil Nadu available at}

Table 2.2: Distribution of schools in urban Coimbatore across various categories and levels of schooling (Based on data from Census of India, 2011)

Type of school

Level of school Government Private Total

Primary 489 (74%) 169 (26%) 658 (100%) Middle 229 (64%) 129 (36%) 358 (100%) Lower Secondary 119 (45%) 145 (55%) 264 (100%) Higher Secondary 82 (39%) 127 (60%) 209 (100%) Total 919 (62%) 570 (38%) 1489 (100%)

It is striking that the overall trend is the same in the district and the country. At the primary level, the number of government schools far exceeds the number of private schools. Even while the absolute number of private schools decreases as we move to higher levels of schooling, their proportion in comparison with government schools increase. These statistics reflect both the government’s efforts since the 1980s to expand primary and upper primary schooling as well as the neglect of secondary schooling until recently (Biswal, 2011). Further, it can be seen from the tables that private schooling is more widespread in urban areas of Coimbatore district when compared to the country at large. This is partly because figures presented in Table 2.1 include rural areas of the country. In general, these figures underscore the penetration of private schooling in my field site as well as across the country.

This increased privatisation of schooling at higher levels corresponds with a steep drop in Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER)14 _{from primary years to higher secondary. In 2015-16,}

the GER at primary level was 99.2, while at the lower secondary level it was only 80.0. At the higher secondary level, it was an abysmally low at 56.2 (Government of India, 2018, p.28). Research has noted that children from economically and socially marginalised groups are more likely to study in government schools, and to drop out earlier (Biswal, 2011; Majumdar, 2005).

14 _{Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) - Number of students enrolled at a given level of education, expressed as}

Further, private schools themselves comprise a wide spectrum in terms of fees charged. Given the absence of data on this matter, I studied the information provided by the Tamil Nadu fee regulation committee, set up in 2009, whose mandate was to fix the school fees of private schools affiliated to the Tamil Nadu state board. Going by this committee’s directives, the annual fees of private schools at the higher secondary level in Coimbatore for the academic year 2018-19 could vary from Rs.9,790 to Rs.52,74515_{. While this range}

is itself substantial, IB schools with an annual fee structure between Rs. 1.5 lakhs to Rs. 6 lakhs (in 2011, Khan, 2011) are positioned at the extreme high end of the fee spectrum. They remain inaccessible to the majority of the country’s population.

Mirroring the changing landscape of the Indian school system is a shift in the dominant discourse of education. At the time of independence, nation building was a central concern for Indian educationists. For example, the founders of Doon school, an elite private school established in the 1930s were concerned with producing leaders for the nation (Srivastava, 1998). In the post liberalisation era, as the educational business became profitable, the discourse that school education can be sold and consumed as a paid service in a free, competitive market is fast gaining legitimacy (Kalra, 2007). The growth of IB and other international schools in recent years reflects this growing commodification of educational provision. A study conducted in 2013 showed that IB schools were being established in the more prosperous western and southern states of India. It is telling that at the time of this study there were no IB schools in poorer states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (Pushpanadham, 2013). The study, commissioned by IBO, notes that ‘the majority of the schools are located in semi-urban areas of metro cities, where socio-economic status of people is comparatively high and where expats reside’ (Pushpanadham, 2013, pp. 54-55). Even today, as evident from the IBO website, IB schools are concentrated in metropolises and limited states.

However, this trend is changing with the massification of IB programme in India (Tarc and Tarc, 2014; Joshi, M., 2017). In the coming years, IB schools are expected to be established in smaller cities and in less developed states. This expansion is likely to correspond with a relatively lower fee structure, less than Rs. 3 lakhs per annum (Joshi, M., 2017). While this is lower level fees within the IB fee band, it is nevertheless a

15 _{This information was accessed at the following website}

formidably high amount, beyond the reach of most Indians. The corporate entry in this sector, such as that of the multinational conglomerate companies, the Mahindra Group and the Aditya Birla Group (see the IBO website), underscores the increased commercialisation of school provisioning in India (Srivastava, 2015).

Having introduced the regional context of my study and positioned IB schools within the larger terrain of schooling in India, I now introduce Kovai International, the site of my ethnographic research.