THE 80 or so pupils in Class 9 of YDVP Inter College, a private school in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, chorus “good morning” to the visitor, and then turn their attention back to the maths teacher. Smartly dressed in blue-and-white uniforms, the children are seated at desks in brick classrooms in a compound surrounded by fields. Fees are Rs170-250 ($2.29-3.37) a month, depending on the grade. That is a stretch for the area’s subsistence farmers and labourers, but the school, which has 1,000 pupils, is full. The 11 teachers are paid Rs2,000-5,000 a month, depending on their age, experience and quality.

At the government-run Upper Primary School, Khujehta, a few miles away, 63 children are enrolled, of whom 50 are present on the day of your correspondent’s visit. They sit on the floor in three classrooms, dressed in grubby pinkish government uniforms, looking at textbooks. Nobody is teaching them; the school’s two teachers are sitting on the veranda. They are paid Rs50,000 and Rs40,000 a month apiece. The average income in Uttar Pradesh is Rs4,600 a month.

Enrolment in the government school has been falling, say the teachers. They blame it on the fact that the head of the village panchayat (council) has opened a private school nearby (not YDVP) and people are sending their children there to curry favour with the big man. Bharat Lal, a labourer in the nearby village, has another explanation: “My children will not go to the government school because they say there is no education, so I have to pay for private school.” His children attend YDVP.

India has long had elite private schools, but over the past decade low-cost private schools have also boomed. Their rolls increased from 44m in 2010-11 to 61m in 2016-17, while those in government schools fell from 126m to 108m in the 21 of India’s 29 states for which there is any data. Geeta Kingdon, a professor at University College London who also runs a private school in Lucknow, suspects that the private-school numbers are an underestimate because many of them are not registered with the government.

Bottom of the class

There are two reasons for the shift. One is the failure of public education. Just how bad India’s schools are became clear when two Indian states participated in a scheme that compares attainment around the world and came 72nd-74th out of 74 jurisdictions in reading, maths and science (academic research suggests private schools are little better). The other reason is the popularity of English-medium education, driven by a combination of social status (English has never quite lost the cachet it had as the language of the ruling class in colonial times) and pragmatism (the internet and globalisation have magnified its usefulness). The great majority of private schools teach, or claim to teach, in English.

Shrinking pupil numbers are an embarrassment to chief ministers. “My one target when I took this job was to reverse the migration out of government schools,” says Sarvendra Vikram Singh, director of education for Uttar Pradesh.

State governments are reacting in two ways. One is to make life difficult for private schools. The Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009 sets out detailed requirements which they must meet—to have a classroom for every teacher, a library and a kitchen, for instance—in order to get the official “recognition” (ie, licence) they need to operate. Although many government schools do not meet these norms, the requirements are being used to close private schools. Shivnandan Singh, an education officer in Lucknow, the biggest city in Uttar Pradesh, with 215 government schools and 200 recognised private schools on his beat, says he has closed down 60 unrecognised private schools this year. The axe is hanging over a further 69, which have applied for, but may not get, the right paperwork. “Up until now we have been going easy on them but this year [the RTE Act] is being implemented strictly.” The press is supportive, carrying stories about the closure of “fake schools”.

But recognition, as Ghanshyam Chaturvedi found, is not just a matter of following the rules. He used to run a 250-pupil school in Lucknow. “The officials were saying, ‘Come to my office’, hinting that I should give them money under the table,” he claims. “How can I give them money? I don’t have enough money, and anyway I don’t want to be part of their corruption.” The school was closed down.

Other school-owners take a different tack. “I gave a donation of one lakh [Rs100,000] to get recognition,” says one. “They said I would go to jail if I didn’t.”

Delhi, with a fast-growing population and overflowing public schools, cannot afford to shut private schools. But the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which runs the city, is restricting their freedom to raise fees. That, presumably, will discourage investment in the sector.

To its credit, the AAP has also pursued a second approach to reviving government schools: trying to improve them. “The state of the schools was worse than we expected,” says Atishi Marlena, a former adviser to Manish Sisodia, the local education minister. “There was the smell of toilets in the classroom, children sitting on the floor, children not there, teachers not there.” Mr Sisodia has taken to visiting schools unannounced, which is reckoned to have sharpened up performance. He says state-school pupils now do better in exams than private-school pupils. But no teachers have been fired for absence, or anything else—teachers’ unions wield enormous political clout, and tend to torpedo reforms that threaten their position.

Outside Delhi, falling enrolment means small, shrinking schools, which makes it hard to run an education system well. Closing schools is unpopular, but Rajasthan has shut about 8,000 and merged others; the number of schools has dropped from 82,000 in 2013 to 63,000 now. It has also decentralised management somewhat. Although head teachers still do not have the power to hire, fire or discipline other teachers, they can recommend disciplinary action to a higher administrative level. “We are thinking of giving power over disciplinary actions to the head teachers, but these are very sensitive matters,” says a local official. “Now at least the teachers are coming to school and teaching.”

Uttar Pradesh is trying to improve quality by addressing a different problem: the range of abilities in classes. Some Grade 8 children can’t read, and laggards who have slipped too far behind may never catch up. So this year, in partnership with Pratham, an NGO that has pioneered the system, the state government is introducing “graded learning”. Pupils will be divided into three ability levels, rather than the standard age-determined grades.

Many states are trying another technique to increase the appeal of government schools: teaching in English. In Uttar Pradesh 5,000 schools converted to English-medium in April this year. That can be a challenge for both teachers and pupils. At Kurauni Primary School in Lucknow, the head teacher, Pradeep Pande, says that most parents are illiterate. Learning is harder for such children in Hindi, let alone in a language which nobody uses either at home or in the playground. Whereas the youngest children are being taught in English, classes are bilingual for Grades 3-5, because “if you teach them purely in English, they won’t understand anything.” Even so, Grade 5 pupils struggle to learn terms like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis” alongside Hindi explanations of plant biology. But enrolment has risen from 117 in April, before the switch, to 185 now.

These measures may be having the desired effect. In both Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, enrolment in government schools is growing again. More important, though, is the question of what impact they will have on educational attainment. Under Narendra Modi, the prime minister, the government has got serious about collecting data on whether children are actually learning anything. So in a couple of years it should become clear whether the campaign to stop children moving from government to private schools has improved Indian education or made it worse still.