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

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. Yet, we have no public visibility of these behind-the-scenes institutions, let alone a mechanism for their accountability. We worry about school infrastructure, costs borne by parents, learning outcomes, world rankings and more, but are left largely clueless about who runs private schools in India.

Most schools are affiliated to one of the country’s three major boards—state, Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE), leaving aside minuscule ones. Over 400,000 private schools are affiliated with 30 or so different state boards.

Although some states have placed lists of schools and associated non-profit entities in the public domain, the quality and comprehensiveness of this information varies widely from one state to another. No central nationwide list is available that links state-board school names with the trusts that run them.

This lack of information is also true of India’s 5,000-odd ICSE schools. CBSE, which has 31,740 affiliated schools, does have a portal called Saras that offers school-wise information. However, in many cases, the column stating the name of the institution that runs the school is filled with junk data or typo-ridden names; clearly, data collection was not followed by verification.

A simple system of connected databases that link the names of schools with those of associated non-profit entities, as verified against the database of registered non-profits, could solve the issue of structural opacity and make their governance easier. Parents will also be able to verify the credentials of the schools they want their children to attend and the institutions behind them.

After school, over a quarter of India’s 18-23 age group goes on to higher education in colleges and universities. We have 1,338 universities, which include central, state, deemed and private ones.

Universities in India also operate as not-for-profit institutions. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has published guidelines on ‘public self-disclosure’ by higher-education institutions, emphasizing its importance under the National Education Policy 2020.

We recently looked for this information on the websites of varsities ranked in the top 100 under the National Institutional Ranking Framework. The website quality of even top-rated universities leaves much to be desired. Keeping aside the quality of information available, even the mandatory criteria for transparent disclosures that UGC demands is met by barely 60% of our top universities.

The Supreme Court has recently ordered a nationwide audit of all private and deemed universities. Rather than being a one-off exercise, it should lead to the annual collection and publication of standardized information.

In the world of economics, statistics and business, we have benchmarks and best practices for most parameters that go into situational and progress reports. But for the world’s third-largest schooling system—India’s private schools—a search for elementary data that would let us track variables like the average number of schools run by trusts, or their average annual budget, lead to no answers.

Higher-education data is not much better. If we do not know the state of this sector, how can we make policy decisions that lead to progress? How can we reap the rewards of our demographic dividend if we have no idea who exactly is responsible for nurturing children through their education and skill development for employability?

We need accurate data, closely monitored indicators and well-connected systems for regulatory oversight to be exercised properly. The potential of our human capital is our biggest asset. It’s time for transparency, accountability and clarity in the operations of the institutions we entrust this asset with.

The authors are, respectively, founder CEO and chief technology officer at Impactica.org.