By Ravi Nessman
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW DELHI (AP) — The nursery school scramble is on.
Tens of thousands of parents across New Delhi are taking time off of work to complete applications, paying poorly disguised bribes to school officials, and obsessively checking websites in desperate bids to win spots in good private schools for their 3-year-olds.
“It really makes you nervous,” said police officer Madan Mohan, who was waiting to hear if his daughter, Esha, made it past the first round of cuts at one of the five schools she applied to. “We have no choice.”
Private education in New Delhi, like its counterparts in New York or London, was once a luxury reserved for India’s upper class. But with government-run schools largely in shambles and the rapidly growing Indian middle class suddenly flush with cash, the demand for private schools has exploded.
The problem is growing in cities across the country, but it is particularly acute in the crowded capital. About 1.4 million pupils in New Delhi alone attend 1,900 private schools, which generally run from nursery school through high school. The government runs another 3,000 schools.
Parents race to get their children in the doors of one of the city’s 250 elite schools.
Many schools receive four applications for every slot. One well-known school, Air Force Bal Bharati, received 1,600 applications for 85 spots, according to the principal, Anand Swaroop.
Education experts blame the frantic rush on the near collapse of public education, which had traditionally been geared toward churning out future government bureaucrats, not the entrepreneurs and IT specialists that are so valued in India’s exploding economy.
Government schools rarely have working libraries, science labs, or computer rooms, and the curriculum is based largely on rote learning. Teachers are poorly trained and so unmotivated that many do not bother to show up for class, said Ashok Ganguly, former head of the Central Board of Education, which oversees thousands of public and private schools across the country. “There is no scope for a student to excel,” he said.
The demand for better education created a free-for-all among private schools, which began soliciting hefty contributions, or outright bribes, from applicants, rejecting parents based on their professions and even interviewing prospective 3-year-old students to see if they were worthy of a coveted space.
“The process of admission was totally arbitrary and discriminatory,” said Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer who sued in 2006 seeking admissions reforms.
A court-appointed commission led by Ganguly set down new rules for New Delhi schools that banned child interviews, allowed schools to charge only nominal application fees, and demanded the schools to be more transparent in how they choose students.
The application process remains so fraught that it has spawned at least three independent websites, with more than 40,000 members, to guide confused and frustrated applicants.
Sireesh Bansal, a 43-year-old government employee, applied to a staggering 45 schools for his son, taking 15 days off from work to collect and fill out all the applications.
Rajan Arora, who started the website NurseryAdmissions.com after fighting to get his son into school, says the process is as stressful for parents as childbirth.
Despite the rules, some Delhi schools were demanding hefty contributions for “building funds” from parents and one school was asking for 31,000 rupees ($675) in cash, Arora said. Some desperate parents also fall victim to scam artists posing as “consultants” who promise to get their children accepted into the school of their choice, he said.
With demand for quality education surging in recent years, new and increasingly lavish schools have opened across the city, some charging as much as 100,000 rupees (about $2,200) a year, a huge sum here that dwarfs the cost of college and is about four times the country’s average annual income.
Dozens of children play in an indoor playground underneath a soaring glass atrium at The Sovereign School.
The school is targeting parents from India’s growing professional class who want their children to have the computer and technology skills needed to compete in modern India, said Preetika Jindal, the principal.
Outside Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, one of New Delhi’s most renowned private schools, parents waited for hours in the evening cold for school officials to post the list of those who made it to the interview stage.
Simin Jaffry, a 39-year-old psychologist who applied to 10 schools for her son, did not make the cut.
If things look really grim, she could be forced to turn to an old acquaintance who called a few weeks ago offering to get her son into a top nursery school for a commission of 400,000 rupees ($8,700). (end)