Why You Should Be Worried About the State of our Government Schools

India’s GDP has risen faster than most countries in the world, but on most human development indicators, we show little progress and even regression.

One of the failures of us a nation has been in providing quality education and health-care.

If you are an Indian reading this, you've probably had years of private education, and visits to private hospitals.

Private players will always look to charge as much as people are willing to pay, and indeed, the cost of private tuition has sharply increased in the past 5 years.

Media coverage is biased towards the Indian middle class. Since the middle-class seeks refuge in private schools, the state of government schools receives far less attention than it deserves.

We can’t expect a free market to solve education and health-care for the poor. It’s just not lucrative enough. Instead, it is the job of the government to provide strong public services in these domains. Indeed, one the most important roles of the government is to ensure equal opportunity despite economic, social, and caste differences.

And it is the job of us as citizens to discuss government schools, to advocate for their better functioning, and ultimately to provide the political incentive to the government to enact effective policy change.

Ask yourself if a kid educated in a government school in most states in India has a shot of landing the same job as you. And think about how growing up with so much stacked against you could lead to resentment in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata.

Improving government schools and better access to primary health-care is not on the minds of most today.

But it should be. Else the country will look more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.

*Influenced heavily by the preface of An Uncertain Glory, by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen*