Indian aspirations: toddlers feel the heat

Finding places at top Delhi schools is now a middle-class fever, says David Loyn

Manoj Sadh claims that getting a child into a top Delhi school is like entering for Miss World. "If the lady gets the right answer, she gets the points." Her son Pratham, who is just four years old, has a tutor at home six days a week, teaching him to read, write and count. The books he uses would be appropriate for a British six-year-old.

When the test day comes, Pratham sits down at a desk for a formal exam. Some children are left weeping outside as they refuse to be parted from their parents. The teacher shouts instructions to the children to write the alphabet and numbers, read some words, sing a song and, most difficult for Pratham, to hold a simple conversation.

His family, first-generation city-dwellers who made their money selling silks to Europe, are bitter at the way toddlers are expected to speak English before they come to school. It puts up another barrier to outsiders. Pratham's mother, Renu, who lives in the traditional reserved style of village India, rarely leaves her house and speaks almost no English.

The language of the Raj is India's only truly national language, linking the ruling class as Latin linked early medieval Europe. One parent explained: "If you speak English, you are considered much more superior. But by spending a month's salary on educating each child for a year, the Indian bourgeoisie are buying more than language; they are buying an education system that remains untouched by half a century of educational progress elsewhere in the world."

Children are taught by rote, and learning is accompanied by risk and reward: punishment can be severe; successful children are given sweets. As part of a conformist society, in which the extended family still provides a guiding structure, the system works. Indian middle-class teenagers of my acquaintance are mostly motivated, well-mannered and fearfully bright. When they go abroad to college (and the US is more fashionable now than Britain), they do well in competition with the children of more liberal western education systems.

But there is a cost. Many young children have little sense of play, and Delhi's psychiatrists are doing brisk business with the casualties of the selection system, both parents and children.

As well as testing the children, most schools conduct intensive interviews of parents - maybe the most telling part of the Indian educational story. For the schools demand considerable back-up from home. What they are offering is only part of the package, and they want to make sure that the parents keep up the beat.

Shama Bajaj is a graduate who has turned her back on a career for herself in order to give maximum support to her children. In one school, she and her husband were separated and given a questionnaire, which asked their opinion on statements like"Spare the rod and spoil the child". In another, Mrs Bajaj's son was turned down because when she was asked what she would like to bequeath him, she said it might be a favourite toy. This was deemed "too materialistic".

Outside the charmed inner circle of private schools, the state sector is not an option for the ambitious. State schools are under-resourced and engulfed by the tide of India's growing population, which will top a billion early in the next century. Around half of India's children have no schooling at all.

The introduction of positive discrimination in universities has put greater pressure on the system. With most university places now reserved for low-caste children, the old lite are push ing their children even harder.

The test at four is the narrow gateway into schools that the children will not leave until they reach 18; and the race has become even more intense as India has turned towards free-market reforms. Although the number of places in private schools has doubled in the past decade, there are now 20 applicants for every place.

The newly rich want to buy the western life-style they can see on satellite television. Traditional English-medium education is seen as the passport to prosperity in a society where the first question asked by middle-class thirtysomethings at parties is "What school did you go to?"

So the schools can erect whatever hurdles they want, and in some cases there are discreet suggestions that prospective parents might like to contribute to fundraising appeals before the final confirmation of a place comes through.

It is clear that the schools are making the choices, not the parents. One school refused to show a family around its classrooms, and even erected a screen to keep them out.

India is trying to move into a more central position and its people prize education above all else. The Asian immigrant newsagent near my north London home has just got his son into Westminster School, which he chose in preference to Eton, where he also won a place. In Delhi, the competition might have been more fierce.

This article is based on research for a programme in the'Correspondent' series, to be broadcast on BBC2 at 6.30pm on Saturday 6 May.