Wait, there’s more. Now further imagine you are also the umpire and part of the team that assesses that all the participants fought on fair grounds, violated no rules and did not cheat in any manner whatsoever. If your life wasn’t already hard enough, it just got a bit harder. You actually need to be present when the participants reach and cross the finishing line to make sure the final winner is picked on merit.

It would be no surprise to anybody if you messed up one or even all three tasks assigned to you. You simply have too much on your plate.

That’s precisely the situation state governments in India find themselves in when it comes to the mammoth task of providing free compulsory education to the country’s 400-odd million children through its complex and widespread primary and secondary school system. The Union government acts in a manner akin to the Olympic committee, to try and ensure that the basic rules of the game are followed but it is the states that run the race.

The fact that the government is trying to do all three - rule setting, participation and regulation - has led to a situation where it fails to do justice to the main task: provide a high-quality education to its students. The idea is not to hold a torch for private unaided schools, a majority of whom are providing as poor quality of learning as their government counterparts, but two or three worrying developments have emerged as a consequence.

The complete lack of regulation has led to two primary problems: government schools get with literally anything while new entrants into the private space struggle first to set up and then to stay in business. The lack of regulation of private schools also leads to an inability to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, while many less genuine players who are looking to make money, set up schools, the more authentic and serious players struggle with an endless burden of permissions and requirements to be met.

Several average budget private schools in urban areas are like kirana shops, peddling wares that are slightly better than what the ration shops are selling. With no system of rating schools in place, to attract more students, schools undertake projects to enhance the infrastructure or buy equipment with good optical value but no proven impact on student learning.

The poor quality of government schools has led to an increase in demand for private budget schools. The supply, however, is stagnant. With government policy creating high entry barriers in the sector, the quality of options has deteriorated as costs continued to rise. Entrants into the private school space need to get a certificate of recognition to operate as a school. (Section 18 of RTE). The requirements to get this certificate are stringent and the process of establishing a private school is fraught with bureaucratic hurdles, necessitating the acquisition of at least two other certificates: Essentiality Certificate and the Scheme of Management approval.

This requires the founder to navigate a 30-point checklist, completing 68 procedural steps and assembling no less than 125 documents, including 29 documents for the Essentiality Certificate alone. Each of these steps requires interaction with numerous officials, with the entire process potentially taking up to five years due to legal and bureaucratic delays. In other words, it’s not the easiest space to get into.

Another challenge for any private entrant is to get a UDISE (Unified District Information System for Education) number, which helps the authorities collate data and monitor schools. This is an online form where they need to upload documents and await verification whereas for government schools it is an automated allocation as soon as the school is commissioned. Similarly, private schools have to meet requirements like having a special educator for students with special needs and can be fined if they are found non-compliant. In contrast, government schools often function without even one teacher across grades, let alone ensuring that a special educator is available for children with special needs. The certificate of recognition requires compliance with minimum infrastructure including toilets, drinking water, pupil-teacher ratio, number of working days, and weather-proof buildings. Additionally, by-laws and rules made by the states under RTE or the respective state education acts mandate a minimum plot area, failing which schools may not be recognised.

In several states, private schools are required to match government teacher salaries. The implication of this for a budget private school is tripling the school fees they charge from students. There are also periodic inspections riddled with unpredictability; schools cannot even freely set their admission policies or class size.

This apart, where schools admit children under the RTE’s 25% reservation mandate, they wait for long periods to be reimbursed by the government. Many schools find themselves in a bind as they cannot pay teachers, electricity bills and rents, without getting paid or raising fees.

What is worse is that certain state governments have shut down private schools, which they feel or claim are failing to meet the laid down norms: the state government, for example, shut 931 private schools in Punjab. Further, 219 private schools in Punjab have been shut through a court order dated 20.08.2013 passed by a Division Bench of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana at Chandigarh because of non-compliance with Sections 18 and 19 of the RTE Act. More than 1300 private schools in Haryana have also been sent closure notices by the state government.

This has translated to the displacement of around half a million children from the schools of their choice and triggered numerous litigations as private school owners dispute the orders. In many cases, private school promoters argue that the government schools are losing students to them due to their poor delivery and outcomes and the easiest way for them to fight this competition is to try and shut down the threat by convincing the authorities to throw the rule book at the private schools, even on flimsy pretexts.

“In many cases, it is not clear to the founder why his or her school has been issued a notice when a government school nearby functions with the same gaps or flaws or even worse,” said Vikas Jhunjhunwala, who has been running two budget schools in Mehrauli and Ghaziabad since 2015 with 900 students in both and with an average fee of ₹800 a month. He added this is the single most important reform needed in India’s complex education edifice today.

The good news however is that the national education policy (NEP) has clearly enunciated the need for urgent change. Experts in the sector have argued that for it to work, one, the State School Standards Authority (SSSA) must be backed by law. Two, its charter must explicitly commit to promoting the autonomy and accountability of all schools, empowering parents with information, which allows them to make informed decisions on where they would like their wards to study.

Equally critical is the ways of working and governance of the regulator such that it puts private and public schools at par and treats both equally. Kapil Khurana, associate project director at Central Square Foundation (CSF), which is assisting states set up the SSSA, said that as a parent, one should be entitled and be able to see verified and comparable quality information about all the schools nearby and choose.

Khurana added that if the state government could aggregate the same information at a panchayat, district, or state level, it can serve multiple purposes of system diagnosis and make the relevant stakeholders answerable, bringing in much needed accountability. “An authority that facilitates disclosure in the sector can solve many prevalent problems manifesting due to a lack of transparency and accountability,” he pointed out.

With the NEP outlining this as a priority, many states have taken steps to set up SSSAs. Assam takes the lead in one of the most critical areas of reform needed in education with a legislation: Assam State School Standards Authority (SSSA) Bill, 2024, which aims to establish an independent SSSA in line with the suggestions of NEP 2020. This will help create an effective and transparent regulatory system based on a minimal set of standards for all stages of education including pre-school, across public, private and philanthropic schools in the state. The legislation has been welcomed by those who are invested in the education sector as it is the first that widens the ambit of regulation to include private and government schools.

Some states like Maharashtra, Punjab, Sikkim, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh have notified or simply renamed their exam boards as the SSSA over the last three years but this remains more on paper especially since in most states it does not cover private schools. The Uttar Pradesh government has recently asked state officials to begin work on setting up a SSSA, a natural extension of its Mission Prerna, a massive state school education reform exercise that began in 2019.

But so far only Assam has moved the needle on this reform in a meaningful way by introducing a comprehensive legislation and Bill. Unless more states follow Assam’s lead, India’s children will continue to suffer on account of the indifferent education on offer across the country.