India

The nation of India has recently faced the realization that the scale of educational change is too big for the government to fund.  As a result, the private sector has to assume an important role in increasing educational access.  “The government finally announced the much awaited plan to allow private sector investment in secondary schools via the PPP route — with a few caveats, rules and deposits of course. This is a major shift in policy, though we see that the opportunity has not been extended to primary education yet.”  This policy is in line with what has been happening at the pre-school level, as an article from The Hindu highlights.  In addition to these newspaper articles, a study in Economics of Education Review by Amita Chudgara and Elizabeth Quinb “call[s] into question the claim that [the] private school effect may be unequivocally positive and highlights the potential heterogeneity in private school performance in the Indian context.”