When Public Schooling Weakens, Families Pay

A child can attend a government school without paying a conventional school fee.

That does not mean education costs the family nothing.

There may be expenditure on tuition, transport, books, digital access or other forms of academic support. And if parents decide that the local government school is not adequate for what they want for their child, they may shift to a private school and take on a much larger direct expense.

This creates an important distinction in how we think about public education.

The question is not only what the State provides inside a school.

It is also what families have to purchase outside it.

When public provision is uneven, households respond differently. Families with greater financial capacity can look for another school, pay for transport or add private tuition. Families with fewer resources have fewer ways to compensate.

The quality of public schooling therefore has consequences even for children who never attend a government school.

It affects how much educational responsibility remains collective and how much is transferred to individual households.

School choice increasingly involves household finances

India’s school system is not divided neatly between public and private education.

Government schools still account for the largest share of enrolment: 55.9% of students are in government schools, compared with 11.3% in private aided schools and 31.9% in private unaided schools. But the balance changes sharply between rural and urban India. In urban areas, 51.4% of schoolchildren attend private schools, compared with 24.3% in rural areas.

Private schooling is therefore not confined to a small affluent segment.

It has become an important part of how many families, particularly in cities, organise their children’s education.

The movement has also increased over time. Between the 75th and 80th rounds of the NSS education surveys, private enrolment at the primary level in rural areas rose from 20.9% to 25.9%, while middle-level enrolment increased from 16.7% to 21%. In urban areas, private primary enrolment rose from 50.5% to 55.3%, and middle-level enrolment from 41.8% to 49.8%.

But these numbers need to be interpreted carefully.

A family moving its child to a private school does not necessarily mean that the government school has failed.

Parents consider many things when choosing a school: perceived quality, location, language, facilities, peer environment, aspirations and household circumstances. Rising incomes can also make private schooling more affordable.

The 75th-round NSS recorded perceived unsatisfactory quality of nearby government institutions as one reported reason for attending private institutions, alongside considerations such as location, facilities and English-medium instruction.

The important point is therefore not that private enrolment proves government-school failure.

It is that the choice of a private alternative usually changes who bears the cost of education.

Public schooling can have a low fee but a high opportunity cost

The difference in household expenditure between government and non-government schooling is substantial.

The latest MoSPI survey reports average household expenditure of about ₹2,863 per student in government schools compared with ₹25,002 in non-government schools. Course fees are the largest expenditure category. The survey also found that 26.7% of government-school students reported paying course fees, compared with 95.7% of students in non-government schools.

The older NSS data show how the gap varies by level and location.

Annual private-school fees in the cited survey ranged from ₹17,988 at the rural pre-primary level to ₹33,567 at the rural higher-secondary level. In urban areas, they ranged from ₹26,188 to ₹49,075. Government-school fees were much lower, ranging from ₹823 to ₹7,308 in rural areas and ₹1,630 to ₹7,704 in urban areas.

Converted into monthly terms, private-school expenditure ranged from ₹1,499 at the rural pre-primary level to ₹2,797 at higher secondary. In urban areas, the corresponding figures were ₹2,182 and ₹4,089.

The significance of these numbers depends on household income.

For a family with substantial disposable income, changing schools may be a preference.

For a family living close to its financial limits, the same decision can alter the household budget materially.

The cited comparison with household consumption expenditure is particularly revealing: private-school expenditure at the pre-primary level can be comparable to the monthly per-capita consumption expenditure of the poorest 5% of households.

The difference is therefore not simply between a low-fee school and a high-fee school.

It is between households that can absorb the additional cost and households for whom that cost can constrain the choices available to them.

Tuition adds another layer of household spending

Private schooling is only one way families spend beyond the public system.

Many children remain enrolled in school while receiving additional instruction through private tuition.

The NSS data show that 25.5% of rural children and 30.7% of urban children take private coaching. Participation increases at higher levels of education. In rural areas, it reaches 36.7% at the secondary level and 33.1% at higher secondary. In urban areas, it reaches 40.2% and 44.6% respectively.

The expenditure also rises with educational level.

Average annual expenditure on private coaching is ₹7,066 per student in rural areas and ₹13,026 in urban areas. For higher-secondary students, the corresponding figures are ₹13,803 and ₹22,394.

These figures matter because tuition sits outside the ordinary cost of attending school.

A student may therefore be enrolled in one institution while the family purchases additional teaching elsewhere.

But tuition should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that the school is failing.

The reasons are mixed.

Higher household income, better-educated parents and urban residence are associated with greater demand for private tuition. Some families may purchase tutoring because they want an additional academic advantage even when the school is functioning reasonably well.

For another family, however, tuition may be a response to a child struggling with material that the school has not adequately supported.

The same expenditure can therefore arise from very different circumstances.

A 2024 study by Ankush Agrawal, Parul Gupta and Debasis Mondal found a negative association between private tuition and indicators of school quality. In simpler terms, students in better-quality schools were less reliant on tutoring.

That does not prove that weak schools cause private tuition.

It does suggest that the quality of the school and the household’s need to purchase supplementary instruction can be related.

Private provision responds to demand — but not equally for everyone

There is a reason private provision grows when families perceive gaps in schooling.

It can respond relatively quickly.

A parent can change schools. A student can join a coaching centre. A tutor can be hired when a particular subject becomes difficult.

This flexibility is useful.

But the ability to use it depends on household resources.

A family with enough money can respond to a weak local school by paying for a different school, arranging transport or adding tuition.

A family without that financial room may have to remain with the available option.

This does not mean private schools are uniformly better than government schools. Nor does it mean that government schools are uniformly inadequate.

It means something more basic:

the ability to respond to educational shortcomings is itself unequally distributed.

That creates an important difference between formal access and practical choice.

Two children may both have the right to schooling.

One family may have several ways to improve the child’s educational environment if the local school is inadequate.

The other may have very few.

The resulting inequality is not necessarily created by private education itself.

It can arise when household purchasing power becomes the main way families compensate for differences in public provision.

Why falling government-school enrolment deserves attention

The issue becomes more important when government-school enrolment declines.

Government schools with fewer than 10 or even zero students increased from about 52,300 in 2022-23 to more than 65,000 in 2024-25, while the number of teachers working in these very small schools increased from 1.26 lakh to 1.44 lakh.

But the reasons for changes in enrolment are not straightforward.

UDISE+ has cautioned that changes in methodology make some recent comparisons with earlier years difficult. It would therefore be too strong to interpret the decline as evidence that families are simply abandoning government schools.

There may be demographic changes, migration, parental preferences and administrative changes operating at the same time.

The more important policy question is what happens when public provision becomes weaker in places where families have limited alternatives.

A middle-class household may be able to respond by changing schools, arranging transport or paying for tutoring.

A poorer household may not.

This makes school choice partly a question of economic capacity.

And it means that a decline in the strength or attractiveness of public schooling can have consequences beyond the children who remain enrolled in it.

Private education is not the problem by itself

It would be a mistake to conclude that the solution is to eliminate private schooling or private tuition.

Families make educational choices for legitimate reasons.

Private schools meet genuine demand. Private tutors can provide useful academic support. Additional expenditure can sometimes reflect aspiration rather than institutional failure.

Nor would eliminating private spending automatically eliminate inequality.

Families would still differ in housing, time, technology, parental education and other resources.

The more useful question is therefore narrower:

How much educational inequality should depend on a family’s ability to purchase a better alternative?

That question puts the quality of publicly funded schooling at the centre of the discussion.

A strong public school does more than offer a low-cost place to study.

It reduces the pressure on families to search for substitutes.

It can provide reliable teaching, adequate facilities and academic support without requiring parents to assemble those services separately.

What a stronger public system changes

This is why the public-private relationship should not be understood as a contest between two types of schools.

The real issue is how much of a child’s education is provided through institutions that society funds collectively and how much depends on what individual households can afford.

When public provision is strong, private schooling remains a choice for families who want it.

When public provision is weak, private spending can become a form of compensation.

That distinction matters most at the lower end of the income distribution.

A wealthy family can treat additional educational expenditure as an investment.

A poor family may experience the same expenditure as a constraint.

The policy objective should therefore not be to suppress the private market.

It should be to reduce the extent to which families need that market simply to obtain an adequate educational experience.

That requires stronger publicly funded schools, better teaching, reliable facilities and learning environments that parents can trust.

The larger principle is straightforward.

Education should not become substantially better for a child merely because the family can afford to purchase what the public system does not provide.

Public schooling cannot remove every difference between households.

But it can prevent the quality of a child’s basic educational experience from becoming too closely tied to the family’s ability to spend.

That is ultimately what is at stake when public schooling weakens.

The question is not whether families will continue to spend on education.

They will.

The question is how much of that spending is a genuine choice—and how much is money being spent because the public system has left families with no satisfactory alternative.