Most of us will agree that there is a role for government in facilitating the poorest of the poor to receive a good education. But this doesn’t translate into government owning and running schools.

No matter which way one looks at it, there is no widespread market failure in school education. There is the matter of supporting poor children, but as far as the supply of high-quality supply is concerned, there is overwhelming evidence that the market is competent to do so without any government involvement.

On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence of the failure of government education. As the Secretary to the government of Assam for Education in the early 1990s, I quickly became aware of how the Minister of Education (in a Congress government in my time) used the appointment and transfers of teachers as the key mechanism to extract bribes. The director of education of Assam was the conduit for this. The entire system was totally broken: many schools only existed on paper and “teachers” drew salaries when there was nothing on the ground.

The seriously misguided policy idea that the government must directly own and run schools came about as a result of a grievous error of analysis made by Lord Macaulay nearly two hundred years ago. This misconception continues till today among the “educated” who are not aware of the ground reality. The socialist Aam Aadmi Party’s misplaced passion for government schools is one such example, and discuss my meeting on this issue with a senior AAP leader some other time.

The “educated” typically have a belief that parents won’t send their children to school unless they are compelled by the state to do so. It is believed that given a chance, poor parents prefer to deploy their children as child labour. But the reality is that – as James Tooley’s research has confirmed this fact that was well-known to many of us – all over India hundreds of millions of poor parents are sending their children to for-profit low-cost private schools. Roughly a third of India’s poor children attend such schools.

Further, that some parents may indeed deploy their children as labour (extremely rare today) is actually the inevitable consequence of socialist policies that make parents view education dimly – as not being worthwhile since it won’t improve their children’s job prospects. There is a strong factual basis for this perception since millions of low quality “graduates”, who are totally unsuited for the job market, are found unemployed today across India in second-tier towns and in the villages. Let’s us, therefore, agree that there is no one more keenly interested in the welfare of their children than the parents. We must harness this powerful force instead of rejecting it.

Second, there is a mistaken belief that a school must have significant infrastructure and paraphernalia, or that its teachers must necessarily be “highly qualified”. But as Gandhi said in a speech at Chatham House in 1931: “the schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people” and “The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator, so he came out with his programme. Every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth”.

Gandhi, therefore, said: “I defy anybody to fulfil a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century. This very poor country of mine is ill able to sustain such an expensive method of education. Our State would revive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls”. What a brilliant thought! – except that there must not be any direct role for the state even in such schools.

James Tooley’s book, The Beautiful Tree, shows that children who attend low cost for-profit private schools (including in India) achieve much higher educational outcomes than children from comparable government schools, despite such private schools having virtually no infrastructure and the teachers of such schools not even being “adequately” qualified. The reason these schools succeed while government schools fail is that teachers in the private schools are held to account for outcomes by the Principal, who is often the school owner. These for-profit undertakings depend critically on demonstrating real results in order to continue to get the custom of the poor parents who pay a small fee on a monthly basis and will quickly switch their child to a competing school if they don’t’ see significant progress each month.

Tooley’s research enables us to totally dispense with the myth that government schools are required to educate children. This research has also confirmed Gandhi’s assertion that excellent village schools operated in India prior to British rule. These schools functioned from the houses of the teachers, did not need a vast paraphernalia of infrastructure, and all sections of the community were able to send their children to these schools to avail high quality, low-cost education. In Shanti Niketan, Rabindranath Tagore was basically attempting to replicate this form of education, with a focus on learning and not on facilities or infrastructure.

Unfortunately, Macaulay’s misplaced paternalism injected government into schools in India and was also copied by the UK, which had an entirely private (or local) school education system prior to that. In both cases, the effect was harmful, as the number of students and quality of education plummeted. Till today, an average government school across the world performs much worse than an average private school, barring a few exceptions.

We noted at the outset that the government must support the poor to access education – to ensure equality of opportunity. There is a simple and direct way to achieve this without owning and running schools, by providing vouchers of certain nominal value (depending on the income level of parents) for each poor child up to year 12 that can only be exchanged for school education (including for vocational education). This is our party’s policy. These vouchers would enable the children of poor parents to attend a good for-profit private school.

The idea of vouchers has a long history and has also been tried out in a number of ways across the world, although not in the full-blown manner that’s our party’s policy. Milton Friedman is probably best known for his advocacy of this system but his ideas did not go far enough. He was willing to allow competition between private and government schools but our party does not see any role whatsoever for even a single government school. Our party is committed to the total privatisation of all government schools – in a well-structured manner.

The alignment of incentives when parents choose (and themselves fund, even if to a small extent) for-profit private schools is the best way to quickly and significantly improve India’s dismal quality of school education.

Our party would, of course, remove most regulations in this area, such as requirements for infrastructure, playgrounds or even for the qualification of teachers. The market will determine who is best placed to teach. All we would require is that each school pick an affiliating board (such as CBSE, but that would need to be disbanded and private boards would emerge) and demonstrate high quality student outcomes in order to be eligible for the school vouchers. This would be an outcomes-based regulatory system, with detailed management (including things like the medium of instruction) left to schools and parents: the parties with the deepest direct interest in outcomes.

We therefore disagree with things like the Right to Education Act which we see as a socialist anachronism. India needs to fully liberate the education sector to allow the best private sector initiatives to emerge, unfettered by the misguided notions of any delusional (and mostly corrupt) bureaucrat or minister.

The government has sufficient core work to perform, in which it has repeatedly failed. When Indian governments can’t deliver security and justice, how can they possibly deliver education? Today India is led by a government which can’t distinguish between mythology and cosmetic surgery, between homeopathy and medicine. So what makes us think it can teach our children?