India does not face an education crisis in the conventional sense of system failure or neglect. Schools function, examinations are conducted, enrolments have expanded, and credentials are produced at scale. Yet, this administrative order conceals a structural problem. Schooling, particularly in the private sector, has increasingly prioritised regulatory compliance and credential output over educational quality, resulting in a system that appears functional while progressively weakening its core purpose.
Protected markets and absent risk
The contemporary private school operates within an unusually protected economic architecture. In most urban and peri-urban areas, demographic density ensures steady demand. Reputation, often accumulated years earlier and sustained through social signalling, substitutes for demonstrable educational value. Parents compete for admission less on verified learning outcomes than as a hedge against uncertainty. This insulation removes the most basic disciplinary force of any sector: the risk of failure. Fees rise predictably, occupancy remains high, and scrutiny rarely extends beyond formal checklists.
Exam results as the sole currency
Within this framework, success is defined narrowly and strategically. A hundred per cent pass rate in Classes 10 and 12, supplemented by a handful of high scorers, has become the primary currency of credibility. These outcomes are manageable through selective attention and exam-oriented instruction. What is not measured—foundational understanding, reasoning ability, and intellectual independence—quietly exits institutional priority.
Schools as social instruments
For many private school owners, the institution has gradually become a social instrument rather than an educational one. The school’s name confers standing, facilitates access, and offers the durable social legitimacy of being labelled an educationist. Far less visible is rigorous introspection on what actually transpires in classrooms, how learning outcomes are shaped, or whether children are meaningfully better prepared as a result.
Teachers trapped in distorted incentives
Teachers operate within the same distorted incentive structure. Their evaluation is rarely linked to student learning progression. Compensation bears little relationship to fees collected, and professional development is treated as discretionary rather than central. Over time, this architecture reshapes who teaches—and why. Recruitment prioritises availability over aptitude, retention depends more on compliance than capability, and teachers are deployed as functional inputs to deliver examination outcomes rather than developed as educators entrusted with intellectual formation.
The tuition economy as symptom, not cause
Predictably, teaching quality is low to abysmal, and a parallel instructional economy fills the vacuum. The growth of private tuition is often attributed to parental anxiety or competitive examinations. This framing misdiagnoses the problem. Tuition has expanded because schools have normalised instructional inadequacy. When children in primary and middle school attend paid coaching despite being enrolled in high-fee private institutions, it reflects institutional failure. Tuition has become compensatory.
This distortion deepens when schoolteachers themselves participate in the tuition economy, offering paid instruction beyond school hours. The school ceases to be the primary site of learning and becomes an administrative conduit, while education is transacted elsewhere. Institutional credibility remains intact, even as the core function erodes.
Low risk, low accountability
Private school ownership has flourished precisely because this model carries minimal risk. Demand is assured, reputational capital substitutes for performance, and regulatory scrutiny remains procedural rather than outcome-oriented. Once enrolments are secured and board results declared, there is little incentive to invest seriously in teaching quality or academic depth. Whether schools are registered as for-profit entities or routed through charitable trusts and layered corporate structures, legal form does not dilute responsibility. Governance may obscure control and cash flows, but it does not absolve owners of accountability for sustained instructional underperformance.
Costs borne by families
The costs of this arrangement are systematically transferred away from institutions and onto families. Tuition dependence, even among young students in expensive schools, carries no reputational or regulatory consequence for owners. Under-supported teachers operate within constrained systems, students internalise inadequacy, and parents absorb escalating financial and emotional burdens. In the absence of transparent public data on ownership, teacher compensation, and learning outcomes, accountability fragments across administrative layers.
Private versus public: a false distinction
Claims of categorical superiority in India’s private school system collapse once learning outcomes and accountability are examined rather than enrolment demand or board results. Public schools falter under administrative and resource constraints; private schools fail through incentive structures that reward superficial compliance, reputational management, and exam optimisation over instructional quality. When students across both systems require parallel tuition to meet basic academic expectations, the distinction between public inefficiency and private efficiency becomes largely cosmetic. What the private system offers is not a remedy to public failure, but a more expensive means of concealing it.
Normalisation of under-teaching
The consequences of this design are visible in everyday ways. Children progress through full timetables with thin understanding; homework is completed, projects submitted, and examinations cleared, while real comprehension is outsourced to evening coaching. Teachers, constrained by syllabi that privilege coverage over mastery, quietly lower expectations. None of this registers as failure because nothing formally collapses. Yet, this normalisation of under-teaching is precisely the failure.
Regulatory overload without learning gains
This dysfunction is compounded by an excess of poorly designed regulation that has turned education into a compliance-heavy, chaotic business—one that enables rent extraction while doing little to improve learning. Regulatory cholesterol, including rigid norms and non-merit-based filters, routinely stifles even basic school functioning, from timely teacher appointments to academic leadership choices, ensuring that procedural conformity crowds out educational judgement.
The case for structural reform
Reform, therefore, requires more than incremental correction. It demands a reorientation of incentives. Schools must be evaluated on learning progression, not merely terminal examination results. Teacher performance must be meaningfully assessed and professionally supported. Transparent public registries linking institutions to ownership, staffing, and outcomes are necessary instruments of governance. Education policy must move beyond managing compliance to enforcing responsibility.
India’s demographic promise is not self-executing. Without urgent correction in how schooling is structured, regulated, and evaluated, numerical strength will translate into qualitative weakness. Education cannot continue as a sector that succeeds by failing quietly. The cost of that silence will be borne not by institutions, but by the nation.
Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai
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