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Indian parents paying top dollar for private education
Straits Times - August 22, 2011
The working professionals, who are in their early 30s, hope the books will help their son learn the basics. After all, he will need to know how to count from one to 10 by the time he is two, to get into a good preschool.
In a country where the population has exploded to 1.2 billion, and Singh have decided to have just one child.
"We can give more time and a better lifestyle to one child. And with education costs going through the roof, I don't think it makes financial sense for us to have another child," said Singh.
She is already obsessing about getting her child into a good preschool. "One of my friends told me that they would help my son get into a top kindergarten which is by invitation only," she said. "That's a start."
As the demand for education rises in India, the cost of private education is also going higher and higher, pinching household budgets.
Education has emerged as the No. 1 item for discretionary spending in household budgets. The cost of sending a child to a private school has been rising by as much as 200 per cent in the last five years, according to a survey by Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India.
The survey on the steep rise in education fees, which polled 1,000 parents, showed that they poured 60 per cent of their income on average into their children's education, including coaching and extra-curricular activities.
Even private tuition fees have doubled from 60,000 rupees in 2005 to 120,000 rupees (S$3,200) for one child this year.
Saumi Saha, a 38-year-old single mother who works as an education consultant, spends half of her salary of 60,000 rupees on her nine-year-old son's school fees and extra-curricular activities at a top Delhi private school. When summer comes, there are added expenses for summer camps and theatre workshops, which she feels are giving her son a well-rounded education.
"I now think twice about going out to eat which has also become expensive," she said. "At the end of the day, you can't compromise or skimp on school fees and tuition, so the compromise takes place in other areas."
There are about 75,000 private schools in the country, which can charge anything from 20,000 rupees a year to 600,000 rupees.
Some of the fanciest private schools in the big cities offer everything from swimming pools, air-conditioned classrooms and buses to gyms, computer labs, sports and tennis courts.
A Mumbai school in Juhu, a posh area where movie stars live, was in the news for charging a whopping 700,000 rupees for admission into its preschool, setting a new record.
The school offers everything from a swimming pool, teacher, maid and assistant teacher for seven to nine children in a class to imported toys and an air-con classroom. But it is not just middle-class families who are shelling out more than half of their salaries for education.
Lower-income families are also struggling. Although India has a vast network of 950,000 government schools which provide free education, poorer families also prefer to send their children to private schools.
Most government schools are seen as dispensing a poor standard of education, with one teacher for every 40 students and poor infrastructure.
Education crusader Ashok Aggarwal, a lawyer who specializes in the area of education and is fighting frequent fee hikes by schools, said he sees the impact of rising fees all around him.
"Indian parents, whether they are illiterate or poor or rich, all of them want a good education for their child. If they can spend money, their child goes to a private school," he said.
"But the fee hike in schools is starting to pinch people and has reached a boiling point. I have seen people selling jewelry and withdrawing long-term investments to pay for fees."
In India, by law, schools are not-for-profit institutions, but Aggarwal contends that the opposite is now true.
An audit report by India's Comptroller and Auditor General on 25 public schools in Delhi from 2006 to 2009 found they were charging parents exorbitant fees in a haphazard manner. Thirteen of the schools, many of them top schools in Delhi, had covered a retrospective hike in teachers' salaries dating back two years by passing it to students instead of dipping into their cash reserves. The Delhi High Court is now monitoring fee hikes in the region.
So, it is no wonder that families are left balancing budgets which are already creaking under the weight of not just the yearly rise in school fees but also increasing food prices.
Housewife Anita Virk, 32, sends her two children to a top school in Gurgaon, which charges 70,000 rupees every quarter for each child and has facilities like interactive blackboards and dance studios.
"I wanted a different type of education for my children, in which apart from good education they also receive other skills," she said. "And that is important."
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