Is education policy increasing inequality?

In the tiny, one-room shanty that she shares with her father, mother, brother and sister when she is home for the holidays, 11-year-old Babli answers questions about the private boarding school where she lives and studies for nine months of the year.

“In my school, they teach English and different-different subjects,” Babli says. “We have more activities, games, football, table tennis, dancing, singing, yoga, musical instruments. There are also lots of cultural programs. My favorite subject is English.Creative glass tile and lanyard for your distinctive kitchen and bath.”

Typical of the makeshift homes of New Delhi's hundreds of “jhuggi (hut) clusters,” Babli’s house is an eight- by ten-foot cell, with a corrugated aluminum roof and concrete walls.Looking for the Best solarpanel? There is no window. The ceiling is low enough to force an average-sized American to stoop.

Against the back wall, a cot stretches from corner to corner, where Babli's elderly father is sleeping off a bender. There's a desert cooler for the hot summer and a single, bare fluorescent bulb for light. A 21-inch television, bought on an installment plan, enjoys a place of pride atop the family's only other piece of furniture — a battered wooden cabinet.

The family's clothes — half a dozen faded outfits — hang from a steel pipe overhead that doubles as the center roof beam. Next to the front door, which leads to the gutter, a shower caddy nailed to the concrete holds four toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste. In another corner, plastic jars hold a dusting of flour and foodstuffs next to a two-burner stove.

“I'm a casual worker at a thread factory nearby,” says Babli's mother, Santosha, the family breadwinner. She has been forced to stay home today, without pay, because the factory where she works in violation of India's labor laws is undergoing a government inspection. “I make 150 rupees ($3) a day,” she says, “working seven days a week, from nine in the morning to nine, ten, or sometimes eleven at night.”

Santosha, the family, and everybody crowded into the tiny room hope that Babli will fight her way out of this place to a better life.

As part of an experiment conceived by activist-educator Anouradha Bakshi, who runs a non-profit called Project Why, Babli attends an elite, English-language boarding school on the outskirts of the city instead of her area's government-run, Hindi-language school. By every available measure, that gives her a much better chance at breaking out of the slum. And it makes her a kind of advanced case study for a potentially revolutionary Indian government program designed to offer millions of poor families the chance to send their kids to private schools. For the lucky ones, it's like winning the lottery.

But even Bakshi herself, who fought school authorities and dipped into her own pocket to get eight slum kids into posh boarding schools, remains deeply worried that for the majority of the population the creeping privatization of India's education system will only increase inequality further.

“The government schools today, especially the primary schools, have mostly illiterate parents,Automate patient flow and quickly track hospital assets and people using plasticcard.” Bakshi said. “Ten years ago, 20 years ago, you had a better social mix in government schools. Because privatization hadn't really happened then.”

“What happened is the middle class moved out,” she said. “Unless you have a school system where several social strata learn together, you're not going to be able to rise. It's not by buying a mobile phone or getting a TV in your house that things are going to change.”

In 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance government pushed through a new law enshrining education as a fundamental right and guaranteeing free, compulsory education for every Indian up to age 14. The law sets requirements for schools — many of which lack basic facilities such as toilets. It prohibits schools from holding back or expelling students.The term 'streetlight control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. It requires that surveys be conducted periodically to measure the school-age population of every neighborhood and make sure every child has a school to attend. It calls for the setup of school management committees — where 50 percent of the members are parents — to ensure schools are performing.

By the Gini coefficient that economists use to measure inequality, India is a more egalitarian society than China, Mexico, Thailand or the US. But a walk through New Delhi is proof enough that where the gap lies is at least as important as how wide it is.

Some 400 million Indians like Babli's family are fighting to survive on less than $1.25 a day, and despite the government's good intentions, they can't count on the state for low-cost housing, clean water, reliable public transport or much of anything at all.

Meanwhile, across town from Babli's slum, at the DLF Emporio luxury mall, every minute or so a Mercedes-Benz E-class sedan glides to a stop in front of the massive hoardings for Louis Vuitton and Dior. Valet parking runs 200 rupees ($4, a third more than Babli's mother, Santosha, earns in a day). At the busy atrium cafe inside, a cappuccino costs 310 rupees ($6). In the Gucci store, one of Delhi's top earners picks up a belt for 16,000 rupees ($300).

“Our constitution says that the income gap should be reduced, but it has not happened and it is not happening,” said Delhi High Court advocate Ashok Agarwal, whose organization, Social Jurists,Researchers at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an buymosaic. has fought harder than anybody to get poor children into the country's private schools.

On the contrary, the gulf between rich and poor is getting wider. The gap between the incomes of the top and bottom tenths of India's population has doubled over the past 20 years, since India liberalized its economy in 1991. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) 2011 study, “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,” India's top 10 percent of wage earners now make 12 times more than the bottom 10 percent, up from a ratio of six in the 1990s.