New Delhi, Dec. 8: The Right to Education Act has entitled every parent to demand free schooling for their children up to Class VIII. But Naveen Sarvang of Sarangpur village, on Delhi's outskirts, is not interested.

The Grade IV civic employee sends his two young sons to St Charles Secondary School, a private English-medium school in Samaspur, 3km from the village, even though the civic body has been running a Hindi-medium school at his doorstep for decades.

'I can't compromise on my children's future,' said Sarvang, 40. He isn't the only parent thinking this way.

Nose-diving enrolment at its Hindi-medium schools has prompted Delhi's civic body to propose a public-private-partnership (PPP) model under which NGOs would run these schools with their own teachers and an English-medium syllabus.

The student exodus apparently owes to a rise in Delhi residents' living standards and their aspirations.

Sarangpur residents are mostly well-off farmers, with every household earning at least Rs 20,000 a month, a civic official estimated. Sarvang himself drives a car.

Over the past decade, the civic body has introduced English as the medium of instruction at about 60 per cent of its schools, where enrolment figures are now 100 or above.

But the Hindi-medium civic primary school in Sarangpur has just eight pupils (and one teacher) across Classes I to V, all of them the children of migrant labourers. None are from the village's 300-odd families of permanent residents.

The picture is no different in Kair, 8km from Sarangpur. The civic body has two primary schools, one for boys and one for girls, in this village of about 1,000 families. Their combined enrolment is 20.

'Only migrant labourers' children are enrolled in these schools,' said Mahendra Singh, 50. 'Parents here send their children to two private, English-medium schools that have come up in the village in the past 10 years.'

Going PPP

The civic body plans to hand over the running of its schools that have fewer than 50 students to non-profit organisations working in the field of education.

For every child in these schools, the private partner will be paid what the civic body spends on teaching each student at its schools.

This figure will be worked out by dividing the civic body's education budget with the number of children it teaches. If approved, the policy will come into force next year.

'We have identified about 20 schools for the first phase,' a civic official said. 'For a two-year assessment period, the NGOs will engage their own teachers and equipment. If the model is found satisfactory, the private player will run the school for 15 years.'

The Central Square Foundation, an NGO advocating the PPP model for municipal schools, said this was a win-win situation for the civic body and the public.

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Its founder and CEO Ashish Dhawan said the model would improve the quality of teaching and learning, and increase enrolment.

He said a similar experiment in Mumbai with 20 civic schools and non-profit organisations such as Akanksha Foundation, 3.2.1 Education Foundation, Muktangan and Aseema had been successful.

'It's critical to select high-quality school operators and provide them operational autonomy and reimbursement on a per-child basis for financial sustainability while holding them accountable for student learning,' Dhawan said.

P.A. Inamdar, a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education, the Centre's apex adviser on education, echoed Dhawan.

'If the government hands over the schools to reputable and established private organisations and pays them the running cost, the quality will improve. Parents will again have faith in government schools,' he said.

A report by the NGO Pratham in January said the preference for private schools was fast picking up in many states, with Kerala sending 70 per cent of its children to private schools despite a good public infrastructure.

In 2013, just 18.19 per cent of children in government schools could do basic subtraction compared with 44.6 per cent in private schools, the report said.

In the impoverished eastern states, where no general shift to private schools has been seen, private tuition continues to rule. In Bengal, the report said, 74 per cent of schoolchildren take private tuition though less than 10 per cent go to private schools.

Merger woes

Outside the capital, a similar trend of falling numbers at government-run and aided schools has prompted many states to start merging low-enrolment schools to cut costs, angering activists.

A large proportion of these mergers have happened presumably in poor and backward regions. Activists blame the falling enrolment on 'systematic neglect' of the government schools, saying the mergers will hit the poorest the most because they cannot send their children to faraway schools.

Official data show that enrolment in the country's 13 lakh government and aided primary schools fell to 13.24 crore in 2013-14 from 13.34 crore in 2009-10 - just before the Right to Education Act was enforced in April 2010.

Union human resource development ministry sources said that Karnataka and Maharashtra had merged about 20,000 primary schools in the past one year. Activists said about 17,000 schools in Rajasthan might face the same fate.

'If there's more than one school within 1km or 2km, they have been merged,' the Union ministry official said. 'Many schools have also closed evening shifts and absorbed them within the day classes.'

Under the Right to Education Act, every habitation must have a primary school within 1km.

'But if there's a poorly maintained hilltop school for just five children at a tribal village, say, it doesn't make sense to sustain it. Rather, those students should be provided transport to a bigger school,' the ministry official said.

'The teachers can be effectively utilised in schools that are understaffed. The building can be used for other activities like skill training, adult education or information centre.'

No state government, though, has started any transport system. The official said the Centre could not push the states on this, education being a concurrent subject.

'It betrays governments' apathy to the conditions of their schools and pupils, who are mostly from disadvantaged sections,' said All India Forum for Right to Education spokesperson Madhu Prasad.

'Enrolment in government schools has fallen because the schools have been systematically neglected.'

Prasad said health and education were the minimum responsibility of the state government, which it could not shrug off.