Educational corruption arising in and through the private tutoring sector in Maharashtra State, India

• In Event: Shadow education in Asia: comparative perspectives on private supplementary tutoring (panel 2)

Proposal

Shadow education or private tutoring is fast becoming an integral part of the educational process of millions of students around the world. Recognizing the role of tutoring in students’ lives, scholars have been conducting regional and comparative studies to develop conceptual understanding of this phenomenon. Concomitantly, several possible determinants and a mix of desirable and undesirable outcomes aspects have been identified. Empirical research on shadow education in India, a country with a burgeoning tutoring sector, is also beginning to gain importance. It has focused on the expansion and role of tutoring due to challenges in mainstream institutions. Very little work examines how private tutoring leads to various malpractices among stakeholders in both mainstream and shadow education.

With such background, this paper explicates corrupt and unethical practices that arise from the widespread usage of private tutoring. It is based on a larger, ongoing qualitative study on the political economy of tutoring in India. Collection of data pertaining to tutoring usually poses several challenges due to the informal and covert settings in which it takes place. Understanding of corruption is even more challenging, and requires a thorough knowledge of the local context and a certain degree of trust. Over prolonged and oft-repeated interactions in regional languages, data was collected through class observations, formal interviews and informal conversation with students, parents, teachers, school heads, tutors and owners of tutoring centers from urban regions of Maharashtra. The multiple viewpoints increased convergent validity of the data. Using theoretical underpinnings from economic sociology, the paper combines concepts of open system subject to exogenous and endogenous forces and social embeddedness in pecuniary transactions. Based on these conceptual frames of references, data was categorized into themes to examine how the stakeholders have participated or been unwittingly implicated in educational wrongdoings. The transgressions ranged from flagrant violation of students’ and parents’ privacy for coercing them into tutoring to proxy marking of students’ attendances at mainstream institutions for a price. Furthermore, ethical issues pertaining to the practices of teachers moonlighting as tutors brought forth the underlying dynamics between the mainstream and the shadow sector.

In light of the prevalence of private tutoring, Maharashtra state has commissioned drafting of Maharashtra Private Tuitions (Regulation) Act, 2018. While still in its draft form, the bill seems to primarily address matters of fees’ regulation, registration and taxation norms and infrastructural requirements, accrediting less importance to issues of educational corruption. As such, this paper by highlighting the various malpractices at the micro-level of the actors involved, is pertinent in drawing attention to points that need to be considered by policy-makers while framing regulatory tutoring laws. It also raises the wider issue of the need for research and regulatory policies in countries where corruption arising from private tutoring is prevalent so that global and state efforts towards provision of good quality, equitable education do not get nullified.

Author

• Shalini Bhorkar, UCL Institute of Education