Harda, Madhya Pradesh:
The phenomena of Indian parents sending their children to private school, no matter whether they are rich or poor, isn't just happening in big cities. It has spread to towns and villages, as well.
I recently visited the village of Badichurlay, about a three-hour drive from Indore, in Madhya Pradesh. The village has about 3,000 people and agriculture dominates the local economy. It is connected to the rest of the country by all-weather roads and is connected to the electricity grid. Badichurlay is neither rich, nor deprived.
The village, with just around 600 school-aged children, has three government schools and three private schools.
The government schools operate from spacious buildings with playgrounds and highly trained teachers with university degrees. The education is, of course, free, but they also provide a bevy of other freebies to attract students: lunch, books, uniforms and even free bicycles to students who have to commute more than two miles. And they offer scholarships of $6 to girls and $4 to boys to encourage families to send their children to school.
The three government schools together have 166 students from the first to the 10th grades. They spend a total of $3,050 on the salaries of eight teachers and three support staff every month, or about $18.37 per student.
By comparison, the private schools have 272 children and spend about $1,340 a month on salaries, rent and other expenses, or about $4.93 for each student. About 100 of the village's students go to expensive schools outside the village and pay at least $240 in annual school fees, including transportation.
The private schools in the village charge parents between $24 and $48 per year in fees, and often make up the difference with grants from non-profits and other sources. They pay their teachers a starting salary of around $30 a month, a fraction of the $160 a month that the government pays its junior teachers.
The differences inside the classrooms were just as stark - though not in the way one might expect.
In the private schools, children sat neatly on floor mats with their legs crossed. They wore smart ties and carried school bags and water bottles. Teachers appeared to be busy leading their students in lessons. The schools were generally clean.
By contrast, the government schools were dusty and grimy. Though classes were supposedly in session, most of the children were running around in ill-fitting casual clothes, rather than their uniforms. The teachers were also roaming about, rather than going through lesson plans. Several were absent on the day that I visited, according to the teachers who were there. Government teachers also have a lot of work outside the classroom, they said.
"We in government schools do lot of non-teaching work in national census, conducting of elections, electoral rolls, polio campaigns, etc," Rem Singh Solanki, a teacher in the government high school, told me. "That disturbs our teaching work."
It was not clear whether the teachers who were absent on the day I visited the school had been called away to perform other government duties.
At one of the private schools, teacher Manoj Sharma told me that he and his colleagues showed up even though they were paid less because they knew they would lose their jobs if they did not teach. Government jobs were far more secure.
"Our salaries are less, but accountability is more," he said. "Even parents pay more attention to their children if they are paying the school fees."
Still, private school owners said they were worried about the Right to Education law that took effect in April 2010, because it requires all schools - public and private - to have far bigger classrooms and playgrounds than most schools have today. Schools have until 2013 to meet those rules, but operators of private schools say they cannot hope to meet the deadline without significantly increasing school fees.
"We do fear the new law," Mr. Sharma said. "We will try to deal with the government through parents. It will become a political issue because a large number of families is are involved."