Everyone knows India doesn’t have enough good schools. Private sector can meet the demand, if the government lets it. There is no shortage of private capital or entrepreneurial interest. School education, say experts, is a $100 billion opportunity over the next four years. But what is killing the growth of school education entrepreneurship is absurd regulation. ET spoke to dozens of educationists, entrepreneurs, former regulators, and parents. The consensus is that private schools need a few simple, logical rules:They should be allowed to be for-profit. Quality education and a profitable enterprise aren’t mutually exclusive.Schools should be able to charge what fees they want, and let the market decide whether they need to revise their prices.They must be allowed to set their admission criteria; quality should not get killed by ill-planned social engineering.The government must also recognise a few home truths.Stifling the growth of private schools is a terrible mistake when government capacity for rapidly expanding quality education is limited.Low cost subsidised government or heavily government-aided schools should coexist with a flourishing private school sector.Politicians meddle too much in education because many of them have a finger in the education business pie. It’s not in their interest to have a transparent regime for private investment.So how can India’s private school system get better, more attractive for entrepreneurs who can provide quality education?A major problem, say entrepreneurs, private equity investors and education experts, is that the Supreme Court has on several occasions ruled that school education can’t be a for-profit venture.Experts and entrepreneurs, who did not wish to identified, said it is time a considered legal challenge to this court observation be mounted. “The context of education is changing pretty quickly. Are we ready for the workplace and social context? Why is the employability of our future workforce abysmal?” asks Manit Jain, founder and director of The Heritage Schools.Others say the not-for-profit rule creates incentives for an inspector raj and rewards those ready to play crooked.Thanks to the non-profit rule, says Manish Sabharwal, founder, TeamLease Services, gaming the system is widespread. “More than 90% of private capacity created in the last two decades is for profit,” he says, pointing out quality suffers when crooked entrepreneurs get in. Rules, for example, deter teachers from setting up their own schools because they can’t raise third-party risk capital legitimately.“Those who flout rules, flout them with impunity,” says Satya Narayanan R, cofounder of the Indus World School chain.“Everything and anything is interpreted by the inspecting authority (according to their) whim.” This has infected the system with corruption, says TV Mohandas Pai, chairman, Aarin Capital Partners, and Manipal Global Education Services. “The government has failed as a regulator of education. Education in India is over-regulated and over-controlled.And that’s why there is widespread corruption,” says Pai. “We need better mechanisms, greater transparency, and monitoring by an independent body.”The experience of a Delhi-based school is instructive. The school was making losses after a flat fee formula was put in place by the Sixth Pay Commission. Schools with a teacher-student ratio of 1:55 and those with a ratio of 1:10 had to charge the same fee, even though the latter offered students a vastly better learning environment.“The government needs to respect differences in the way some private schools operate,” says the founder of the school.Educationists want greater autonomy in admissions. “An entrepreneur who has invested time, money and effort in establishing a school should have the right to grant admission to at least a handful of students of their choice,” says Arun Kapur, director, Vasant Valley School. “Again, corruption can be avoided through healthy competition among schools and a vigilant parent body.”India has 1.5 million kindergarten-to-Class 12 (K-12) schools, of which 400,000 are private. Premium schools, which charge an annual fee of Rs 1 lakh and more, are less than 1% of this.These 1.5 million schools have 264 million seats and the private ones put together enroll 106.2 million students. India needs tens and thousands of more schools, experts say, including schools that cater to different social classes and paying capacities.The challenge is acute, says Gopal Karunakaran, CEO of Shiv Nadar School. “We are in a school education crisis in India. We have a three-fold challenge — quality, scale, and access. If we don’t reform, it will become a catastrophe in 10 years,” he said.Government interference is a huge deterrent, says Kapur. “This is increasing day by day and the autonomy of private unaided schools is being stifled,” he says. The role of the government should ideally be confined to assuring education for all, not trying to deliver it to all. An entrepreneur who establishes a school and invests financial resources, time and effort will want to run a school in line with his or her vision. When this is denied, there is little motivation to establish schools, much less to expand them, says Kapur.Plus, there is the regulation about B.Ed. colleges, which is supposed to provide enough quality teachers, but don’t do the job. Trained B.Ed teachers are hardly employable, leaving the task of training to private schools which in turn cannot hire non-B.Ed teachers.India will require 2 million more teachers by 2020 to attain the world average in student-teacher ratio, according to consultant Technopak. This will mean training 400,000 teachers a year against a capacity of 300,000 when adding up all the seats at B.Ed. colleges in India. And the quality of these are teachers is often poor.Shiv Nadar School provides 140 hours of training every year to each teacher. “The pre-service teacher’s training is irrelevant, and as good as extinct,” says Karunakaran.Vasant Valley School has initiated a Return to School programme, under which each teacher attends a two-hour continuing education module every week. “Private schools should be given the discretion to appoint teachers based on the requirements of their curriculum and medium of instruction,” says Kapur.The state should mandate a basic qualification level and the effectiveness of teachers can be monitored through assessment of learning outcomes, he said.Experts say the government should be a facilitator of quality education, not its controller. Giving government school principals more autonomy will ensure they will no longer be mere administrators but also evolve into education leaders.Sabharwal calls for an ease-of-doing business project aimed at cutting down on the need for multiple approvals from local authorities besides state and central governments (see Key Approvals...). The process should also be moved online, he says.A policy on the lines of Start-up India is needed for the education sector, says Prashant Jain, director of Sarla Holdings Pvt. Ltd that runs the Pathways Schools, and Narayanan of Indus WorldSchool chain. That can in turn build a pipeline for startups in India, they argue.“What better place than schools to make Start-up India happen,” says Jain. “Encourage private entrepreneurs to build schools that will make the future generation startup-ready.”Regulatory approval should restricted to ensuring the school has enough funds for infrastructure, appointing qualified teachers, getting itself certified or being rated by pre-appointed bodies, says Pai. Don’t make the policy thinking of the worst, think of the best, says Narayanan. The government should realise that some entrepreneurs do really want to contribute to a better future, he says.That’s the nub of the problem — the government must accept that entrepreneurship can bring about a revolution in school education, and that no one is holding back India’s chiLdren more than the government that says it cares for them.