In the 150th year of the great uprising, another small mutiny is taking place: A mutiny against poor-quality and expensive government education. Whether the mutiny will spread across the country like the soldiers' one did remains to be seen, but posterity demands the event be recorded at least.
By now, most of us know that government schools are a lot more costly than private ones (Geeta Kingdon found, in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, that expenditure per student in private unaided schools was less than half that in government schools, primarily on account of the much lower wages private teachers get).
There is also enough evidence about their poor performance. Localised field studies like those by James Tooley found that, in Hyderabad, students in unrecognised private schools scored 59 per cent more marks than their counterparts in government schools did, while for English it was 1.4 times; in Delhi, Tooley's study found the differences were 72 per cent and 2.5 times, respectively.
An all-India study for rural areas by Pratham last year found that in class 3, for instance, children in private schools had learning levels that were higher than those in government schools by around 50 per cent - while just 18.1 per cent of class 3 children in government schools could read a full story, this figure was 28.4. per cent in private schools; for the ability to divide in the same age group, the figures were 14 and 21.3 per cent, respectively.
Which, by the way, is why the Pratham study showed, the proportion of children enrolled in private schools in rural areas showed a huge hike, from 16.3 per cent in 2005 to 18.8 per cent in 2006.
Though there are no comparable data to show movement to private schools in urban areas, a limited exercise done by the Centre for Civil Society (whose motto is Free Choice) shows even the generally poor and poorly educated parents of children in government schools want to move out, though they do not because they lack the necessary funds to do so.
Starting April this year, a group of 52 CCS volunteers fanned across 68 of the poorest of Delhi's 272 municipal wards and tried to preach the virtues of making parents free to send their children to private schools.
They did this on a shoe-string budget, but with imagination, using rickshaws with loudspeakers and catchy skits to put across their message. So there was one involving Munnabhai and Circuit which got everyone all charged up; in another, a wife is telling her husband, a school teacher, that they now need to find a school for their growing son "but I don't want him to go to your school", the wife is clear.
The CCS is offering a voucher of Rs 300 per month, enough to pay the fees in primary school, for a period of three years. Such is the frustration with government schools, for the 400 such vouchers that are being given, that the CCS has got 100,000 applications! Imagine the number they'd have got if this was done across all 272 wards, with a sizeable number of volunteers to cover the wards intensively, and for more than just the 4-5 weeks the CCS volunteers put in. That's not all.
The scholarships were only for people in the very low-income groups and whose children were in classes 3 to 6 in government schools - but the CCS got another 300,000 parents (whose children were younger/older and did not qualify for the voucher) to sign a letter to the government saying they wanted a voucher system that allowed them to decide if they wanted to send their children to government or private schools.
Once parents decide which school gets their money, they will be in a better position to control the education outcomes - they'll insist, for instance, that teachers come to teach.
The CCS is planning several such exercises to show just how deep the groundswell is, and its teams have begun campaigning on the subject in Orissa, Jharkhand, and Bihar, and will soon start working in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
A similar campaign by the government would have cost many times more, but the CCS is working with other NGOs to come up with more cost-effective campaigns - a campaign in six districts in Tamil Nadu, for instance, has been handed over to a group of Dalit women who've come up with a budget of just Rs 24 lakh (Rs 2.4 million) for a year's campaigning.
While these projects are aimed at letting the political class know just how many citizens want to escape the tyranny of poorly-run schools, another project plans to estimate the actual difference that private schools are making.
On the face of it, there is enough evidence, both from India and abroad, to show this is the case, but some argue incomparables are being compared - the reason, it is said, that private schools have better results is because the children there come from better off families. In a large enough sample this can be checked by controlling for incomes, but there is no such data available for the country - the unit records of the Pratham survey have not been released as yet.
What the CCS plans is to select a town and track the education outcomes of 1,500 children over a period of five years: 500 who remain in the government system, 500 who are in the private-school system, and 500 who have migrated from government schools to private ones.
Since school teachers are a powerful vote-bank and therefore a huge lobby, it is unlikely the government will take them on. But if enough parents put on pressure for change, it is unlikely things will remain the same for long.