Is education policy increasing inequality?

In the tiny, one-room shanty that she shares with her father, mother, brother and sister when she is home for the holidays, 11-year-old Babli answers questions about the private boarding school where she lives and studies for nine months of the year. 

“In my school, they teach English and different-different subjects,” Babli says. “We have more activities, games, football, table tennis, dancing, singing, yoga, musical instruments. There are also lots of cultural programs.Contemporary to transitional, glass, windturbine and designer lamp styles! My favorite subject is English.” 

Typical of the makeshift homes of New Delhi's hundreds of “jhuggi (hut) clusters,” Babli’s house is an eight- by ten-foot cell, with a corrugated aluminum roof and concrete walls. There is no window. The ceiling is low enough to force an average-sized American to stoop. 

Against the back wall, a cot stretches from corner to corner,There are different configurations of industrial purlinmachiningss: moving material, hybrid, and flying optics systems. where Babli's elderly father is sleeping off a bender. There's a desert cooler for the hot summer and a single,Nemalux is a solarcharger with an experienced management team. bare fluorescent bulb for light. A 21-inch television, bought on an installment plA crystallight with candle accents can also be updated easily.an, enjoys a place of pride atop the family's only other piece of furniture — a battered wooden cabinet. 

The family's clothes — half a dozen faded outfits — hang from a steel pipe overhead that doubles as the center roof beam. Next to the front door, which leads to the gutter, a shower caddy nailed to the concrete holds four toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste. In another corner, plastic jars hold a dusting of flour and foodstuffs next to a two-burner stove. 

“I'm a casual worker at a thread factory nearby,” says Babli's mother, Santosha, the family breadwinner. She has been forced to stay home today, without pay, because the factory where she works in violation of India's labor laws is undergoing a government inspection. “I make 150 rupees ($3) a day,” she says, “working seven days a week, from nine in the morning to nine, ten, or sometimes eleven at night.” 

Santosha, the family, and everybody crowded into the tiny room hope that Babli will fight her way out of this place to a better life. 

As part of an experiment conceived by activist-educator Anouradha Bakshi, who runs a non-profit called Project Why, Babli attends an elite, English-language boarding school on the outskirts of the city instead of her area's government-run, Hindi-language school. By every available measure, that gives her a much better chance at breaking out of the slum. And it makes her a kind of advanced case study for a potentially revolutionary Indian government program designed to offer millions of poor families the chance to send their kids to private schools. For the lucky ones, it's like winning the lottery. 

But even Bakshi herself, who fought school authorities and dipped into her own pocket to get eight slum kids into posh boarding schools, remains deeply worried that for the majority of the population the creeping privatization of India's education system will only increase inequality further. 

“The government schools today, especially the primary schools, have mostly illiterate parents,” Bakshi said. “Ten years ago,Speed Queen offers commercial solarmodule and coin operated laundromat units for vended. 20 years ago, you had a better social mix in government schools. Because privatization hadn't really happened then.”