Every March and April, millions of Indian families brace themselves. Not for exams. For bills. The new academic session has begun today, and across the country, parents are walking out of private schools with bags full of books and wallets drained of thousands of rupees.
This is not a coincidence. This is a system.
Here is the core of the scam. NCERT publishes textbooks for classes 1 to 12 as per the set syllabus. One such book costs around Rs 65. Now, take the same syllabus, get a private publisher to print it, and that same book gets sold inside private schools for Rs 650. Ten times the price. For the same content. Written by far less qualified authors.
And parents have no choice but to buy it.
Private schools follow the NCERT syllabus; they are required to. But they quietly bundle in books from private publishers alongside NCERT books, and push them onto students. These private publisher books cover nothing extra. They add no additional knowledge. They do not go beyond the syllabus. What they do carry, however, is a fat commission for the school that sells them.
The numbers tell a damning story. India’s total school book market is worth Rs 42,000 crore. Private publishers control 70 percent of that market, nearly Rs 28,000 crore, even though government schools, which teach 61 percent of all students, use only NCERT books. Private schools have fewer students but make far more money.
Meanwhile, NCERT spends Rs 100 crore every year just on research. Economists like Bibek Debroy, historians like Sanjiv Sanyal, and scientists like Dr Shekhar Mande are part of NCERT’s expert panels. These are the books private schools are quietly replacing with cheaper-to-produce, error-ridden alternatives.
And errors there are serious ones. A nursery rhyme book called My Rhyme Book, priced at Rs 175 for just 23 pages, has a poem about a family that shows five people in the picture but says “We are four in all.” On another page, a counting exercise shows five fingers next to the number three. This is what private schools charge ten times more to teach Indian children.
The fees story is just as brutal. In metros like Delhi and Mumbai, sending one child to a private school costs up to Rs 6 lakh a year. In cities like Lucknow, Bhopal, and Patna, it ranges from Rs 1 to 4 lakh. The average Indian family of four earns about Rs 5 lakh a year. That means a family can spend up to 40 percent of their entire annual income just to educate one child in a private school.
And fees are not fixed. In 2024-25, the average Indian income rose by 8 percent. Private school fees rose by 15 to 25 percent in the same period, nearly three times faster. In the last three years, some schools have hiked fees by 80 percent. At Delhi’s Salwan Public School in Mayur Vihar, parents who protested a fee hike were punished by having their children barred from entering classrooms.
India has 15 lakh schools. 23 percent are private. Yet the annual turnover of private schools in this country is nearly Rs 5 lakh crore — more than the annual budgets of Bihar, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat combined.
As Nelson Mandela once said, ” Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” In India’s private school system, that weapon has been turned against the very people it was meant to help.
Expensive fees. Overpriced books. And errors in the pages children are supposed to learn from. This is not just a consumer issue. This is a national crisis. Rules must be made. Oversight must be enforced. Because what happens in a child’s classroom today determines what kind of country India will be tomorrow.
