Shweta Sharan In India, planning and managing a school’s budget becomes tricky, given that the business of running a school in the country is not legal. In other words, you cannot legally make a profit as a school-owner. The educational trust under which your school is registered cannot make a profit. No wonder then that we have seen heavy investment in education start-ups that offer ancillary or outsourced services but very little investment in schools! In a report on Budget Private Schools, Ekta Sodha, CEO of Sodha Schools, a chain of low-cost private schools in Gujarat, talks about the particular problems she faces to keep costs low but benefits high. In the report, she says: “After exploring many possibilities, we realised the best option to move forward was to create a set-up of an educational services’ company alongside an educational trust. The services company would buy the land and build the buildings; the trust then rents these from the company. The education services company designs the assessments, creates curriculum workbooks, conducts teacher recruitment, teacher training, fees collection and so on. The trust again pays for these services. We figured that creation of this somewhat complex model was the only legal way to move forward paying due taxes on profit generated through services.” Most of India’s biggest and plushest schools are run by land owners, but what happens to individual and progressive voices in education? For example, in the last 10 years in Bengaluru, there have been as many as eight new progressive schools that are small or medium-sized and want to experiment with fewer numbers and higher quality. But given the restrictions that school owners face in terms of running a school, the plight of the small school principal becomes especially tricky. We spoke to a few principals of small schools in India and how they grapple with the many complexities of running a school’s budget. Prarthana Gupta, Sandeepani Academy for Excellence Sandeepani Academy for Excellence is a progressive school located in Bangalore, inspired by the philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. They have classes till grade 9 and will soon be affiliated to the CBSE board. Says the founder, Prarthana Gupta, “Since ours is a smaller school, the founders are more actively involved. In Sandeepani, the principal has a more curriculum-based role and I take care of the budgeting and planning, which is more stressful! Both of us are in sync with our vision for the school. We only plan to have a certain number and

Bipin Dhane Can community schools be sustainable? Before we discuss that, let’s examine what is meant by a community school. Community schools are budget private schools or affordable private schools as they are called in India, but one condition being that they are opened and run by the community and for the community. Such schools are mostly opened in rural areas where a sense of community still exists in its healthy form. It starts with a community being dissatisfied with the existing schools. In most cases these are government schools, often with multi-grade classrooms, without an emphasis on English language, with pronounced lack of motivation and absenteeism in teachers. Importantly, one ineffective outcome is that these schools produce unemployed youth in the community. In the light of such conditions, some communities take it upon themselves to open a school as an alternative to the existing schools. Let’s take the example of one such community. Majuli is a river island in the river Brahmaputra, Assam, which remains underwater for three to four months in a year. On this island lives a tribal community known as the ‘Mising’ tribe, which does not have a script for its language. Almost all of them are subsistence farmers. In a village called Kulamua, the community had come to the conclusion that they urgently needed a school for their children and so they formed a development committee to build a school. The community members donated land, wood, bamboo and other things needed for the construction and built a school with basic but adequate facilities. The committee then even went door to door in the neighbouring villages to enroll children. They fixed a monthly fee and rules. They hired teachers from the community who seemed motivated and promising, and then started the school with hopes and dreams that their children would enter the world of success. The school started with 110 children and currently, in its third year, has 240 children. Would you call such schools, private schools? Some of you might as they take monthly fees, but I wouldn’t. First, there is no profit motive and the schools are mostly run at a loss. Second, it has been stated as an imperative by the government in schemes like the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) that government schools must focus on community engagement and monitoring. But both the schemes have failed terribly at it. And here you have schools run completely by the community which have a