Just who is in charge of India’s demographic dividend? There’s no data on who runs private schools

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For a long time, we have been banking on India’s demographic dividend, or the fact that we have a high proportion of young people in our population. For this demographic dividend to fulfil its economic potential, young citizens need to be skilled and employable.

But we have some catching up to do—45% of children are not proficient in basic literacy and numeracy at the end of primary education, and our universities do not make it to global research leadership charts. We cannot hope to achieve our Viksit Bharat goal without closing learning gaps. The primary route to do so is through education and training institutions.

India has achieved nearly universal enrolment—most children of school-going age are enrolled in schools. Our government schooling system is vast, educating 121.6 million children in the more than 1 million publicly run schools. Another 125.3 million children—more than half the total—study in 457,000 private schools, which form the world’s third-largest schooling system by themselves.

In all, these one-and-a-half million schools oversee the education of just under a fifth of the world population under 15 years of age. In other words, our private schools are responsible for educating 9-10% of the world’s future workforce. Surprisingly, however, we have scarce data on who exactly bears this responsibility.

Private schools in India are mandatorily run by non-profit institutions, which can be registered as trusts, societies or Section 8 companies. We do not have any publicly available registry of these trusts, societies and not-for-profit companies. The ethos of any institution is heavily influenced by the people who lead and manage it.