While many American students await the results of college admissions in the spring, I was on the other side of the world worrying about India’s kindergarten admissions. It wasn’t for my child; rather, for Yamini, the three-year-old daughter of the local painter, Arumugam. She was a bubbly kid who often came to my free English center with her older sister. Then there was the application for Kithiyon; a doe-eyed serious boy who knew shapes well but struggled with colors. His parents didn’t attend school past the 10th grade, but the father still eked a living as a driver. These were just two families of the 80 for whom I submitted applications to the city’s top private schools. If they applied under the general admissions category, this group wouldn’t stand a chance.

With a mere acceptance rate ranging between 7–12%, it is statistically more difficult to get admissions into a Chennai private school than most of the Ivy Leagues: at Kilpauk’s Chinmaya Vidyalaya, for instance, over 1,500 families applied for just 160 kindergarten seats. The highly competitive nature has only intensified with the city’s growing population pressure. When I visited the campus during February’s admissions cycle, I witnessed nervous parents dressed in their most expensive gold-threaded saris and Burberry polos as they awaiting their chance to appear before the principal. Each was given a brief 15-minute time slot to be shared with 10 other applicants. To prepare for kindergarten interviews such as these, parents spend weeks grooming their child, rehearsing the English names of colors, and teaching them to sit up straight. In one or two minutes, the school renders its snap judgment and move on to the next child. Clearly, no school can judge the “academic potential” of a kindergartener in such a fashion; they can, however, weed out the autistic, mentally disabled, and physically challenged. While not quite as undesirable as the poor, kids from these groups seldom make the cut, either.

Some schools skip the charade of judging a “child’s personality” as a criterion altogether: Kola Saraswathy, for instance, calls families only after reviewing their paperwork — the important documents being proof of income, parent occupation, and education credentials. No qualitative metrics such as parenting style or a description of the child’s temperament appear as questions on LKG applications.

With family pedigree as the primary consideration for admissions, my group of applicants was at the bottom of the heap.

But I wasn’t counting on the good graces of the administrators to get the painter’s child accepted. Rather, I was leveraging a dirty little secret of a law called the Right to Education Act, also known as the RTE. This law mandates that private schools set aside 25 percent of their kindergarten intake to children of lower caste families that earn less than 2 lakhs (or, $3,500) annually. If selected, these students must be given 10 years of free education with the assurance that the government will reimburse all school fees.

Schools hate this law for two obvious reasons: the first is because it takes away from their “donations” pool, or, the under-the-table cash transactions that can be as high as $10,000 per child. Like a mafia racket, staff members whisper this unofficial donation figure to the accepted parents, who, in turn, bring large envelopes of cash to a predetermined location. This off campus rendezvous entails the handoff of cash to an unaffiliated person who signals to the school that the deal is done. Indeed, it is this group of parents who subsidize the school’s Olympic-sized swimming pools and science labs; their children are the ones likely to earn the highest test scores on account of copious resources with which to hire tutors. If a child gains acceptance under the Right to Education Act, however, no such financial arrangement can legally transpire. A batch of RTE children, then, can cost top private schools up to $100,000. Moreover, the government has failed to keep its promise of reimbursing schools for the basic tuition costs.

The second reason schools hate the RTE is because many of India’s top-tier schools hold vestiges of a “separate but equal” attitude reminiscent of the US 1960s segregation era. Unlike in the US, India’s private elementary schools have few, if any, merit-based scholarships, financial aid packages, or diversity programs. Their elite demographic is a matter of pride, resulting in any slogan regarding raising the “best and brightest” to actually mean, “wealthiest and forward caste only.” Administrators acknowledge the need to “help the poor,” but only if the charitable work occurs outside of their gated walls. Schools believe they’ve done their part if they’ve held used school supply drives to dump at the dilapidated doorstep of the nearby children’s home.

The obsession over expensive, private schooling may be confusing to those who live in countries offering high caliber public schools. In India, government schools are considered a last resort for many reasons. Teachers instruct in Tamil (rendering any chance of obtaining a middle-class profession obsolete), and most students have difficulty achieving basic literacy by the 8th grade. Government schools also face chronic problems of teacher absenteeism and low morale. The infrastructure is usually abhorrent, whereby crammed students must be content with a single overhead light bulb illuminating the dirty, chipped paint walls. Even government schoolteachers do not send their children to public schools — according to a 2012 survey conducted by the government of India, 96% of public school teachers send their children to private schools. Rather than enrolling their children in subpar public institutions, many of India’s poor prefer taking copious amounts of high-interest debt from dubious moneylenders to send their children to private schools with questionable — sometimes outright fabricated — credentials. Parents recognize that private schools remain one of the only hopes of achieving entry to the middle class.

To the poor parent willing to try their odds with RTE admissions, the application process is fraught with obstacles. For starters, the application is in English, a language understood only by the country’s middle class and above. Parents earning less than $3,500 a year in India have as good of a grasp in English as I have of Spanish (which is to say, a distant comprehension of it obtained from taking one semester in high school). To illustrate my point, last year I made the disastrous mistake of encouraging parents to fill in their own application — one parent put his own birthday instead of his child’s. Another listed the school’s address instead of her own. These countless errors afford an easy opportunity for administrators to deny admissions on the basis of “false or incorrect information submitted.”

Another hurdle is the issue of technology. Some schools, such as Maharishi Vidya Mandir, require families to submit an online application unique to their institution. Checking the status of one’s application submission requires an email address. With a crude antenna-based television considered a luxury among the poor, Internet access remains woefully out of reach. Though India’s younger generations increasingly partake in WhatsApp conversations on hand-me-down cracked mobile phones, parents find the act of browser navigation in English is still a foreign concept. Asking a parent to submit an online application without error, then, is like expecting a philosophy major to land the Challenger without crashing.

Parents face not just logistical hurdles, but blatant discrimination, often starting with the watchmen. Some watchmen deny entry not only to those deemed as a security threat, but to any parent deviating from the manicured look of their student body. Last year, one gave an obvious appraisal of the parent’s attire before barking, “You want to apply here? You?” When I accompanied one obviously pregnant parent, A. Anusuya, to a school during a muggy May afternoon, the watchman asked her to stay outside while I was permitted entry. “Go explain your business,” he said, “and I’ll wait for the school to tell me if she’s allowed inside.” Others dismiss the parent outright by stating, “Admissions are over,” or, “come back later.”

If parents make it through the gates, staff members frequently capitalize on the ignorance of parents by mandating fees and citing outdated rules as grounds for rejection. Some forms of discrimination are harder to describe, but equally palpable as any verbal insult — it’s exuded by the staff’s tone of voice, air of condescension, and dismissiveness. One parent, R. Chithra, actually declined a seat at a school of great repute because in her words, “they treated me so terribly that I couldn’t imagine how they’d act towards my child.”

When applications finally reach the decision-makers, schools show remarkable creativity in flouting the law. Some pad their RTE admissions list with the names of general admissions parents. Others hold a lottery for the candidates, but put numbers outside the slips of paper, so as to select the fake names of their choosing. Another common tactic is to prolong the RTE admissions decision past the first day of the school year — this approach forces the parents to enroll their child somewhere else and withdraw their application; otherwise, the parent is left with no school seat for their kid. Other brazen schools like Kilpauk-based Kola Saraswathi opt out of RTE admissions altogether, as evident by their refusal to acknowledge any of our 22 applications. Despite being required by law to do so, these parents received no receipt of submission, no acceptance or rejection decision, appointment for appeal, or any form of contact once they dropped their application in a large, red padlocked box. It might as well have been a trashcan.

Indeed, every admissions cycle holds great unpredictability. For Yamini, the road ended in disappointment; neither school offered her — along with 76 other families — a seat in the classroom. My only consolation was that at just 3 ½ years old, Yamini remained blissfully unaware of how her future could’ve been markedly shaped for the better. When I saw Yamini in my English class a week later, she was babbling own her unique version of the alphabet in her frilly yellow dress: “A, B, C, D…G…H…I…LMSNO…” The look of disappointment in the parents’ eyes, however, is my least favorite part of my work. Kithiyon had better luck, securing a seat along with just 10 other families from our group. I was the first to break the news to his mother. Pulling out my iPhone, I showed her a picture of the admissions list posted earlier that afternoon. “His name is the last one on the list,” she said, beaming. “That’s true,” I thought. “But he’ll work his way up.”