Weird Solutions: Karnataka Education Minister Says He Will Improve Government Schools By Banning New Private Schools

A Karnataka minister has said that the state government will stop new private schools from coming up in the next five years in a bizarre plan to reform government schools.

Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Tanveer Sait boasted his many initiatives to strengthen the functioning of government schools, where he also hoped to increase the student number.

It is not known whether the minister elaborated on how exactly banning new private schools would help better the quality of government schools. For decades now, sundry activists and clueless ministers have been vilifying private education providers to divert attention from the pathetic condition of public school system in the country. Excepting central government programmes such as Sarva Shiksa Abhiyaan and others, no state government has managed to ensure adequate investment, modern management and better training for teachers. These are hard things to do. What is easier, though, is to vilify private education providers.

Post script: The minister also seems to have mumbled out some homilies about how the rich have misused the Right To Education Act (RTE). This apparently denies the poor the benefits they can get through the Act.

What he did not mention, or perhaps did not even know, is the fact that should he start a new school himself, the institute would not even have to adhere to any RTE regulations. Some of India’s best schools are similarly exempt from RTE regulations just because the founders are from certain communities. You can read more about how the RTE Act favours some communities at the cost of others in this article.