India’s School Shortage Means Glut Of Parental Stress

NEW DELHI — They offer prayers. They set aside bribe money. Their nights are restless.

Parents crowd around the list of children accepted to Tagore International School. The school, in New Delhi, received 2,014 applications for 112 prekindergarten seats.

This is the winter of disquiet for parents of small children in India, especially here in its prospering, fast-growing capital, where the demands of ambition and demography collide with a shortage of desirable schools.

This year, admissions for prekindergarten seats in Delhi begin for children as young as 3, and what school they get into now is widely felt to make or break their educational fate.

And so it was that a businessman, having applied to 15 private schools for his 4-year-old son, rushed to the gates of a prestigious South Delhi academy one morning last week to see if his child’s name had been shortlisted for admissions.

Alas, it had not, and walking back to his car, the fretful father wondered if it would not be better for Indian couples to have a child only after being assured a seat in school. “You have a kid and you don’t have a school to send your kid to!” he cried. “It’s crazy. You can’t sleep at night.”

In a measure of his anxiety, the father, 36, who runs his own company, refused to divulge his full name for fear of jeopardizing his son’s chances of getting into a good school. He reluctantly agreed to be identified by his first name, Amit.

The anxiety over school admissions is a parable of desire and frustration in a country with the largest concentration of young people in the world. About 40 percent of India’s 1.1 billion citizens are younger than 18; many others are parents in their 20s and 30s, with young school-age children.

Today, for all but the very poor, government schools are not an option because they are considered weak, and the competition for choice private schools is fierce.

The scramble is part of the great Indian education rush, playing out across the country and across the socioeconomic spectrum. The striving classes are spending hefty amounts or taking loans to send their children to private schools. In some cases, children from small towns are commuting more than 40 miles every day to good, or at least sought-after, schools. New private schools are sprouting, as industrialists, real estate developers and even a handful of foreign companies eye the Indian education market.

That market is a lot like other things in India. Supply lags far behind demand as cities grow, pocketbooks swell and parents who themselves may have struggled in their childhoods want something better for their offspring.

The father named Amit acknowledged the cravings of his social class this way: “Branding has really taken over. Everyone is looking at what car you’re driving, what clothes you’re wearing, where your child is going to school.”

A retired civil servant, Vir Singh, 68, recognized this shift in his own family. One of his sons attended government school and moved to the United States to work as an engineer. Another attended a decent private school here in Delhi and went on to work for a multinational company, but today refuses to send his daughter to his own alma mater. Mr. Singh said that son wanted his child to attend none but the city’s best. “Now they want more high-fly schools,” is how he put it. “It’s a changed society.”

One morning, in search of a “high fly” school, Mr. Singh arrived at a branch of the coveted Delhi Public School here — as in Britain, “public” means private — to see if his granddaughter’s name had appeared on the admissions shortlist. No such luck. Mr. Singh grumbled about the school’s criteria for shortlisting; he was appalled that the child of a single parent was getting preference. “You want the parents to split up?” he asked incredulously.

The admissions process has never been easy in elite Indian schools. Once, private school admissions were based on an opaque mix of connections, money and preferences for certain kinds of families for certain kinds of schools. Today, as a result of litigation, court-mandated rules in Delhi have been devised to make the process fairer and more transparent, at least on paper.

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