The myth of free and barrier-free access: India’s Right to Education Act—private schooling costs and household experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine relative household costs and experiences of accessing private and government schooling under India’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 in the early implementation phase. The Act deems that no child should incur any fee, charges, or expenses in accessing schooling. Private schools are mandated to allocate 25% of their seats for free via ‘freeships’ for socially and economically disadvantaged children. Furthermore, the Act has a number of provisions attempting to ease barriers to admission and entry to all schools, including private schools. This paper reports household-level data on the schooling patterns, experiences, and perceptions in one Delhi slum accessing schooling based on a survey of 290 households and 40 semi-structured household interviews. We found very low instances of children with private school freeships. Furthermore, children in ‘free’ private school seats incurred the second highest costs of accessing schooling after full-fee-paying students in relatively high-fee private schools. Finally, households accessing freeships and higher-fee schools experienced considerable barriers to securing a seat and admission.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".