The Scope Of Public Private Partnership In Education

In India with 26.06 percent of its population still illiterate which keeps compounding every year there is an acute demand that the educational needs of the country should be at least met with an equal speed (as that of the growth of this number) if not the same, for if we fail to do that, what we will see in the near future will not be a decline in this number but rather an increase. Besides providing universal education is just one part of the problem of education in the country as the next part concerns with the quality of education. A walk to any nearest public school can speak volumes about the quality that is being served in these schools. And India with a booming economy for sure is haunted with the problem of education sitting like an albatross around its neck, for to maintain the competitiveness in the current globalised economy one needs a continuous supply of skilled labour in the market. The state so far has failed to provide education to all its children leave aside the quality of education, but with UN millennium goals including Universal Education for all by 2015 and The right to Education Bill, India, 2005, promising to provide free and compulsory education to all children between the age group of 6 to 14 years and ensuring a school in every childs neighbourhood, the question comes how can it be achieved? Is the state capable enough to finance the education of its million population which hasnt seen the black ink on the paper so far? And if the answer to the latter question is no, then what alternatives are in front of us to meet the targets that we have already set? One possible alternative to the public educational institutions and also an answer to this problem is the Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in education sector. The rationale behind the Public Private Partnerships in education is the potential role the private sector can play in bringing education to every childs door plus in overcoming the bottlenecks of the quality of the current education system. Private education includes a wide range of providers like, for-

profit schools, religious schools, community schools, non-profit schools run by NGOs, publicly funded schools operated by private boards, and community owned schools. The private educational institutions not just meet the supply side of the growing demand in education, but by increasing the choices available to the parents also enforce a quality check in the education sector. For instance in Indonesia, private schools cater specifically to the poorest sections of society, with the government policy explicitly committing to the private schools and channelling public funding into schools. Similarly, in Columbia, with a large scale voucher programme, has showed positive results on quality. In India also, there are such successful examples of Public Private Partnership, for instance, an NGO Pratham has been applauded both internationally and nationally for improving the educational performances of pre-school children from disadvantaged area through the programmes of bilwadi and balsakhi. Another example of the same is the The Azim Premji Foundation, which was set up as a not-for-profit organisation with funds from WIPRO, in 2001 with the objective of ensuring universal elementary education. It works with state governments to improve the learning in government schools using initiatives such as learning guarantee programme.

The public private partnership can work to enhance the current educational facilities in the country and can contribute individually to sectors like finance, pedagogical development, human resources development, service delivery, infrastructure, facilities management, among others, but what must be kept in mind is that the type of the Public Private Partnership in education will vary according to different needs of a particular section and location of the society and therefore it is critical to investigate which are the appropriate roles of each stakeholder in the provision of education in the context of specific markets and locations.