Nearly 30% of children in India (ages 6-14) attend private schools and in some states and many urban regions a majority of the students attend private schools. Compared to the government schools, private schools perform modestly better on measures of learning (Muraldiharan and Sundararaman 2013, Tabarrok 2011) and much better on cost-efficiency. Moreover, even though the private schools are low cost and mostly serve very poor students they also have better facilities such as electricity, toilets, blackboards, desks, drinking water etc. than the government schools (e.g. here and here).

In an op-ed Vipin Veetil and Akshaya Vijayalakshmi argue that the private schools may also reduce caste discrimination:

It’s no secret that government schools in India are of poor quality. Yet few know that they are also breeding grounds for caste-based discrimination, with lower-caste students in government schools often asked to sit separately in the classroom, insulted in front of their peers and even forced to clean toilets. This despite the fact that caste discrimination is illegal in India. …Government-school teachers aren’t necessarily more prejudiced than their private-school counterparts. But private-school teachers find it more costly to discriminate. In a survey of over 5,000 children, academic researchers James Tooley and Pauline Dixon found that students in private schools felt more respected by their teachers than children in government schools.

Caste discrimination in the government schools is also one of the reasons why the private schools focus on teaching English. Among the Dalits, English is understood as the language of liberation not just because it offers greater job prospects but even more because Hindi, Sanskrit and the regional languages are burdened by and interwoven with a history of Dalit oppression. As one Dalit put it, “No one knows how to curse me as well as in Tamil.”