The Expenditure Per Child and the Silence of the System, Rethinking India’s School Education Beyond Patchwork

The Expenditure Per Child and the Silence of the System, Rethinking India’s School Education Beyond Patchwork

In the vast, sprawling apparatus of India’s government school system, there exists a quiet absurdity that has somehow become normalised. It is the spectacle of a single teacher, employed at public expense, reporting each morning to a classroom that contains, on some days, more adults than children. It is the sight of a primary school building, constructed with taxpayer funds, equipped with desks, blackboards, and drinking water, serving a student population that can be counted on one hand. It is the arithmetic of educational expenditure that would be considered scandalous in any other sector: many thousands of rupees, in some cases exceeding a lakh, spent annually on the education of one child in a government school, while a private school in the same vicinity charges a modest fee of perhaps two thousand rupees per month and delivers acceptable, sometimes superior, learning outcomes.

This is not an argument for the wholesale privatisation of school education. It is, however, an argument for the abandonment of sentimentality in educational policy. It is an argument for looking at the numbers—the enrolment figures, the per-child costs, the learning outcomes, the teacher-student ratios—and asking a question so simple and so obvious that its absence from official discourse is itself a symptom of pathology: What are we actually achieving with this expenditure? And if the answer is “very little,” why do we persist in the same structures, the same assumptions, the same toxic division between “government” and “private” as rival tribes rather than potential partners in a common national mission?

The recent decision by several State governments to merge government schools with extremely low enrolment is a welcome, if long overdue, recognition of reality. But as the accompanying article powerfully argues, merger is not reform. It is a patchwork response to a symptom, not a cure for the disease. The disease is systemic: a directorate obsessed with control rather than outcomes, a ministry that celebrates policy frameworks while ignoring their implementation, a departmental culture consumed by transfers and postings rather than pedagogy and learning. Until the “official mind” itself undergoes a grand shift—until education is brought back into the frame and administration is subordinated to outcomes—the mergers will continue, the expenditure per child will remain indefensible, and the children of India will continue to be failed by the very system designed to serve them.

The Anatomy of Absurdity: Low Enrolment and the Per-Child Cost Crisis

The decision to merge government schools with single-digit enrolment is, on its face, an act of elementary rationality. A school with five students and two teachers has a teacher-student ratio of 0.4, which sounds excellent until one calculates the cost per student. If each teacher’s salary is Rs 40,000 per month, the monthly expenditure on salaries alone is Rs 80,000. Spread across five students, this is Rs 16,000 per child per month—Rs 1,92,000 per annum. Add infrastructure maintenance, utilities, administrative overhead, and the per-child cost easily exceeds two lakh rupees annually.

This is not an investment; it is subsidy without return. The children in that school are not receiving an education worth two lakh rupees per year. They are receiving, in all probability, an education significantly inferior to that available in the nearby private school charging Rs 2,000 per month. The government is spending a fortune to deliver mediocrity while simultaneously regulating, inspecting, and often harassing the private school that could deliver better outcomes at a fraction of the cost.

The merger of such schools is a necessary correction, but it addresses only the most visible extremity of the problem. It does not address the structural incentives that produced these schools in the first place: the political economy of school establishment, the lack of any mechanism for school closure, the treatment of teacher postings as patronage rather than deployment, and the absence of outcome-based accountability at any level of the system. Merge these schools today, and in a decade, a new cohort of similarly unviable schools will have emerged elsewhere, unless the underlying conditions are fundamentally altered.

The Control Paradigm: Why the System Cannot Reform Itself

The article identifies the core pathology with surgical precision: “Unfortunately our directorate, our ministry and all other institutions related to education think in terms of controlling things. Education seems to be long shuffled out of frame.” This is the control paradigm, and it is the single greatest obstacle to meaningful educational reform in India.

The control paradigm conceives of the education department not as a service delivery organisation but as a regulatory and administrative apparatus. Its primary energies are directed not towards improving learning outcomes but towards managing inputs: sanctioning posts, effecting transfers, monitoring attendance, disbursing salaries, inspecting schools, enforcing compliance with circulars. The sheer scale of this apparatus is staggering—”thousands working in it,” as the article notes—and the overwhelming majority of its effort is consumed in internal coordination rather than external impact.

This is why policy documents like the National Education Policy (NEP), however visionary their content, so consistently fail to translate into ground-level change. The NEP is read, discussed, and celebrated at conferences and functions. Its recommendations are noted, filed, and occasionally converted into circulars. But the underlying operational logic of the department—its incentives, its routines, its distribution of power and resources—remains untouched. The control paradigm absorbs the policy without being altered by it. The policy becomes a document; the paradigm remains the reality.

The Toxicity of Division: Government vs. Private as Competing Tribes

Perhaps the most insidious consequence of the control paradigm is the adversarial relationship it has cultivated between government and private schools. The article describes this as “toxic division,” and the characterisation is precise. In the official mind, private schools are not potential partners in a shared educational mission; they are competitors, suspects, and targets.

The evidence for this toxicity is abundant and dispiriting. A private school charging modest fees, operating in the vicinity of a government school with single-digit enrolment, is subject to a regulatory regime of extraordinary intensity. A single complaint—even an insignificant one, even one motivated by commercial rivalry or personal animus—can trigger inspections, demands for documents, threats of licence cancellation, and protracted legal proceedings. The same system that spends two lakh rupees annually on a child in its own school deploys its enforcement apparatus with alacrity against a private school that might educate that same child for one-tenth the cost.

This is not regulation; it is protectionism disguised as public interest. It protects not children but the institutional interests of the government school system. It insulates that system from competition, from comparison, from the uncomfortable evidence of its own underperformance. And it is sustained, as the article notes with evident pain, by “cheerleaders in our society”—ideologues and interest groups for whom the distinction between government and private is not a practical question of educational effectiveness but a sacred boundary that must be defended regardless of cost or consequence.

The Partnership Alternative: A Sane Path Forward

Against this backdrop of absurd expenditure and toxic division, the article offers a concrete, radical, and eminently sensible proposal: close unviable government schools and partner with good private schools in the vicinity to educate those students free of cost, funded by the savings from school closure.

Run the numbers. A government school with five students and two teachers costs the exchequer approximately Rs 10 lakh annually in salaries alone, excluding infrastructure and administration. The nearby private school charges Rs 2,000 per month—Rs 24,000 per year. To educate those five students free of cost would cost Rs 1.2 lakh annually. The government would save nearly Rs 9 lakh per year while simultaneously ensuring that the children receive an education in a functioning school with peer groups, competitive teachers, and (presumably) better learning outcomes.

This is not privatisation; it is public-private partnership in its most rational form. The government retains full funding responsibility for the children’s education. It simply contracts out the delivery of that education to a provider that can do it more efficiently and effectively. The private school gains a stable, predictable revenue stream and fulfils a social mission. The children gain access to a better educational environment. The taxpayer gains enormous fiscal savings. Every stakeholder wins.

Why, then, is this not standard practice across every State with unviable government schools? Because it requires something the system currently lacks: the capacity to evaluate private schools on their merits rather than prejudge them as adversaries. It requires the abandonment of the toxic government-private binary. It requires, in the article’s memorable phrase, keeping such decisions “away from ‘Facebookers'”—away from the performative outrage and ideological posturing that passes for educational debate in contemporary India.

Beyond Patchwork: What a “Grand Shift in the Official Mind” Actually Means

The article’s call for a “grand shift in the official mind” is not rhetorical flourish; it is a precise diagnosis of the necessary precondition for any lasting reform. But what, concretely, would such a shift entail?

First, a redefinition of the department’s mission. The purpose of the education department is not to employ teachers, manage schools, or enforce circulars. These are means, not ends. The purpose is to ensure that every child receives a quality education. Every activity, every expenditure, every policy must be evaluated against this criterion. Activities that do not contribute to this mission—that exist only to sustain the department’s internal functioning—must be identified and eliminated.

Second, the substitution of outcome accountability for input compliance. The current system holds school heads and teachers accountable for compliance with procedural requirements: Are registers maintained? Are inspections responded to? Are circulars filed? It holds them almost never accountable for what actually matters: Are children learning? A shifted official mind would reorient the entire supervisory apparatus around the measurement and improvement of learning outcomes. Inspections would focus on pedagogy, not paperwork. Transfers would be based on performance, not patronage. Resources would flow to schools that demonstrate results, not those that merely exist.

Third, the depoliticisation of school management. The establishment, closure, and merger of schools should be determined by demographic data, enrolment trends, and educational planning—not by the electoral considerations of local MLAs or the caste calculations of district officials. This requires insulating educational administration from political interference, a task that is more constitutional than administrative. It may require legislation establishing independent school planning authorities at the district level, with statutory mandates and fixed tenures for their members.

Fourth, the professionalisation of teacher deployment. India’s teacher transfer system is a notorious site of corruption and patronage. Teachers bribe officials for desirable postings; officials demand payment for transfer orders; schools in remote or disadvantaged areas remain chronically understaffed while urban schools overflow with excess teachers. A shifted official mind would replace this chaotic, inequitable system with a transparent, computerised deployment mechanism that allocates teachers to schools based on objective criteria: student-teacher ratios, subject requirements, and the professional preferences of teachers themselves, subject to service obligations.

Fifth, and most fundamentally, the abandonment of the government-private binary as an organising principle of educational policy. Government and private schools are not rival tribes; they are different instruments for achieving the same objective. Both have strengths and weaknesses. Both can improve or deteriorate. The task of the state is not to favour one sector over the other but to deploy both sectors optimally in service of the public interest. This may mean closing government schools and contracting with private providers, as the article suggests. It may also mean, in other contexts, expanding government schools and regulating private schools more strictly. The appropriate mix is an empirical question, to be determined by evidence and analysis, not by ideology and sentiment.

The Children in the Frame

Amidst the abstractions of policy and the pathologies of administration, it is easy to lose sight of what is actually at stake. It is not the reputation of the education department. It is not the employment security of teachers. It is not the ideological purity of the government-private distinction. It is the life chances of millions of children who currently pass through a system that fails them daily.

The child in that government school with five students is not receiving an education worth two lakh rupees per year. She is receiving an education that leaves her, in all probability, functionally illiterate and innumerate after five years of schooling. She is being prepared not for the opportunities of the 21st century but for the same cycle of poverty and exclusion that trapped her parents. And the state is spending a fortune to deliver this tragic outcome.

The child in the nearby private school, paying Rs 2,000 per month, may be receiving a better education at one-tenth the cost. But that child’s family is bearing a financial burden that should, in a just and efficient system, be borne by the state. And that child’s school is operating under a regulatory cloud, subject to harassment and uncertainty, its existence dependent on the forbearance of officials who view it as an enemy rather than an ally.

These children are not abstractions. They are the constituency that educational policy exists to serve. Every decision about school mergers, about public-private partnerships, about teacher deployment, about regulatory enforcement, is ultimately a decision about their present and their future. To lose sight of this—to allow administrative convenience, political calculation, or ideological purity to displace the interests of children—is not merely policy failure; it is moral failure.

Conclusion: The Courage to See Clearly

The article’s concluding injunction—”keep all such things away from ‘Facebookers'”—is not a dismissal of public engagement or democratic accountability. It is a plea for clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis in a domain where clarity is constantly obscured by performative outrage and entrenched interests. The Facebookers, in this context, are not a specific group of social media users but a mode of discourse: loud, simplistic, ideologically rigid, incapable of nuance, and indifferent to evidence. They are the cheerleaders of toxicity, the defenders of the indefensible.

The grand shift in the official mind that the article calls for is, at its core, a shift from this mode of discourse to another. It is a shift from control to service, from compliance to outcomes, from tribal warfare to pragmatic partnership, from sentimentality to arithmetic. It is a shift that begins with a single, simple question: What are we actually achieving for the children? And it proceeds with the courage to answer honestly, even when the answer is uncomfortable.

The merger of low-enrolment schools is an opportunity. It is an occasion to open the meaningful dialogue that has been deferred for decades. But an opportunity is not an achievement. It becomes an achievement only when it is seized with purpose, clarity, and the willingness to challenge settled assumptions and entrenched interests. The children of India have waited long enough. They cannot wait for another round of patchwork.

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Q&A Section

Q1: What is the “expenditure per child” problem in government schools with low enrolment, and why is it significant?
A1: The expenditure per child problem refers to the extremely high per-student cost incurred by the government in operating schools with single-digit or very low enrolment. In many such schools, teacher salaries alone—often two or more teachers for fewer than ten students—result in annual per-child expenditure exceeding Rs 1.5-2 lakh. This is not an investment in quality; children in these schools typically achieve poor learning outcomes. The significance lies in the waste of public resources: the government is spending a fortune to deliver inferior education when far more cost-effective alternatives exist nearby. This problem is not an anomaly but a symptom of deeper systemic failures: the absence of any mechanism for school closure, the treatment of teacher postings as patronage, and the prioritisation of administrative inputs over educational outcomes.

Q2: What is the “control paradigm,” and how does it obstruct educational reform?
A2: The control paradigm is the dominant operational logic of India’s education bureaucracy, wherein the primary function of the department is conceived as regulation, compliance monitoring, and internal administration rather than service delivery or outcome improvement. Energies are consumed by transfers, postings, inspections, and circular enforcement—activities that sustain the department’s internal functioning but contribute little to children’s learning. This paradigm obstructs reform because it absorbs and neutralises policy innovations without altering underlying incentives or routines. Visionary frameworks like the National Education Policy (NEP) are celebrated in conferences and reduced to circulars, but the department’s day-to-day operations continue unchanged. Reform requires not new policies but a fundamental redefinition of the department’s mission from control to service, from inputs to outcomes.

Q3: What specific public-private partnership model does the article propose for unviable government schools?
A3: The article proposes a contracting-out model for government schools with extremely low enrolment. The government would close such schools and use the substantial fiscal savings—from teacher salaries, infrastructure maintenance, and administrative overhead—to fund the education of affected children in good private schools in the vicinity, entirely free of cost to the families. If a private school charges Rs 2,000 per month (Rs 24,000 annually), educating five children would cost the government Rs 1.2 lakh per year—a tiny fraction of the Rs 10+ lakh currently spent on salaries alone. The government saves money; children access better educational environments; private schools gain stable revenue and fulfil social missions. This is not privatisation but rational public procurement of educational services, treating private schools as potential partners rather than inherent adversaries.

Q4: What is the “toxic division” between government and private schools, and how does it manifest in regulatory practice?
A4: The toxic division is the adversarial, zero-sum framing of government and private schools as rival tribes rather than complementary instruments of a shared educational mission. In the official mind, private schools are not potential partners but competitors, suspects, and targets. This manifests in starkly asymmetrical regulatory treatment: a private school charging modest fees is subjected to intensive inspection, documentation demands, and licence threats upon even insignificant complaints, while a neighbouring government school spending two lakh rupees annually per child on abysmal outcomes faces no comparable scrutiny. The system thus protects its own institutional interests—not children’s education—by suppressing competition and insulating government schools from the uncomfortable evidence of their own underperformance. This toxicity is sustained by ideological “cheerleaders” who treat the government-private distinction as a sacred boundary.

Q5: What would a “grand shift in the official mind” actually entail in concrete, operational terms?
A5: A grand shift entails five concrete transformations:

1. Mission Redefinition: The department’s purpose is redefined from administration to ensuring every child receives quality education; all activities must justify themselves against this criterion.

2. Outcome Accountability: Supervisory apparatus reoriented from compliance monitoring (registers, inspections, circulars) to the measurement and improvement of learning outcomes; resources flow to schools demonstrating results.

3. Depoliticisation: School establishment, closure, and merger decisions determined by demographic data and educational planning, not electoral considerations; possible statutory independent school planning authorities.

4. Professionalised Teacher Deployment: Replacement of corrupt, patronage-driven transfer systems with transparent, computerised allocation based on student-teacher ratios, subject requirements, and teacher preferences subject to service obligations.

5. Abandonment of Government-Private Binary: Both sectors treated as instruments for achieving educational objectives; the optimal mix determined empirically by evidence and cost-effectiveness, not ideology.