Comparative Education

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cced20

Inclusion and social justice in neoliberal India:

examining the world’s largest public-funded
programme for private education

Tanushree Sarkar & Xiu Cravens

To cite this article: Tanushree Sarkar & Xiu Cravens (2022): Inclusion and social justice in
neoliberal India: examining the world’s largest public-funded programme for private education,
Comparative Education, DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2022.2074090

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2022.2074090

Published online: 09 May 2022.

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COMPARATIVE EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2022.2074090

Inclusion and social justice in neoliberal India: examining the

world’s largest public-funded programme for private
education
a b
Tanushree Sarkar and Xiu Cravens
a
Department of Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA;
b
Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
A provision of India’s Right to Education Act requires private Neoliberalism; public-private
schools to enrol 25% of children from ‘disadvantaged’ and partnerships; social justice;
‘economically weaker’ backgrounds. Described as a unique inclusive education; non-
governmental organisations
public-private partnership, this policy has been widely debated
for its promotion of private actors in ensuring equity and access
to education. Within this controversial policy field is the
increasing involvement of non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) that aim to reform the education sector through
neoliberal logics and privatisation in India and globally. We
analyse documents and reports from two NGOs and pay special
attention to the discursive strategies employed. Among them, we
find that establishing neutral expertise, legitimising educational
privatisation, and promoting assimilationist pedagogy are
noteworthy practices. We contribute to the extant literature by
illuminating how NGOs implement this controversial provision
and negotiate tensions around their position within a neoliberal
policy landscape, which embodies privatisation in education yet
touts social justice and equality as its objectives.

摘要
印度《受教育权法》的一项规定要求私立学校招收25%来自 “弱
势 ”和 “经济薄弱 ”背景的儿童。这项政策被描述为一种独特的公
私合作关系，因其促使私立机构确保公平和受教育机会而受到广
泛讨论。在这个有争议的政策场域中，非政府组织的参与越来越
多，它们试图通过新自由主义逻辑与私有化，改革印度和全球各
地的教育部门。我们分析了两个非政府组织的文件和报告，并特
别关注其采用的话语策略。其中，我们发现了一些值得注意的做
法，包括建立中立的专业知识、使教育私有合法化以及促进同化
主义教学法。我们通过以下分析对现有文献有所贡献：非政府组
织如何实施这一有争议的政策规定，并且在新自由主义政策环境
中，解决围绕自身地位的张力——体现教育私有化，却将社会正
义和平等作为其目标。

CONTACT Tanushree Sarkar tanushree.sarkar@vanderbilt.edu Department of Human and Organizational

Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 T. SARKAR

Introduction
Public-private partnerships (PPP) in education are viewed as a means to ensure quality
education for all and are associated with notions of inclusion and equity, particularly in
the global South (Verger 2012). As non-governmental organisations (NGOs) increasingly
play an important role in education policymaking, service provision, and administration
(Rizvi and Lingard 2010), they are envisioned as representatives of the demands and
needs of disadvantaged groups and communities through their ability to lead processes
of bottom-up development. However, the democratising potential of NGOs is highly con-
tested under neoliberal and authoritarian regimes (Kamat 2004; Ismail and Kamat 2018).
In this paper, we examine the consequences of the concomitant growth of NGOs and PPP
on discourses of equity, inclusion, and social justice, with a particular focus on the Indian
educational system.
The Indian context is a pertinent site for examining the involvement of NGOs within
PPP arrangements. While there is greater support for PPPs within education in India
(Kumari 2016; Srivastava 2016), there is an increasingly acrimonious relationship
between NGOs and the Indian state, with the sector labelled by the state as ‘anti-national’
and ‘anti-development’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016). Given this context, we ask: How do
NGOs that implement and advocate for PPP programmes and policies legitimise their
presence in the education policy landscape? As questions are raised about the social
justice and democratising potential of civil society organisations (Ismail and Kamat
2018), how do NGOs articulate concerns of equity and inclusion within the PPP paradigm?
We focus specifically on the pedagogical implications of NGO and PPP involvement for
equity and inclusion, a largely understudied phenomenon (Sleegers 2019; Verger,
Moschetti, and Fontdevila 2020). In what follows, we first discuss the theoretical
framing for examining the global role of NGOs in PPP, then provide the contextual back-
ground on educational NGOs in India. We further examine a particular provision of India’s
Right to Education Act that serves as the context of examining the role of NGOs in PPP
arrangements in India. Finally, we discuss the importance of studying the pedagogical
implications of NGOs on inclusion and social justice.

Social justice and neoliberal logics in education: the global role of NGOs in
education and PPP
With the global expansion of neoliberal regimes, scholars argue that NGOs have either
‘fully embraced or actively fight against neoliberalism’ (Brehm and Silova 2019, 287).
Using generations as a heuristic to examine the evolution of education NGOs, Brehm
and Silova (2019) argue that the current generation of NGOs represents organisations
enmeshed within the neoliberal agenda. While NGOs may retain features of the original
four generations, that is, (i) relief and welfare charities and missionaries, (ii) technocratic
and developmentalist NGOs, (iii) large-scale national and international structure NGOs,
(iv) local, national, and globally networked organisations, NGOs must now respond to
the proliferation of global capitalism and neoliberal values. This response may either be
a form of resistance while working within systems or adopting and embracing neoliber-
alism (Brehm and Silova 2019). As Ismail and Kamat (2018) argue, NGOs occupy an
ambivalent position – they may support and further the neoliberal state while are
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 3

‘capable of building alliances against neoliberalism’ (569). In the Chilean education

context, Palma Carvajal (2021) argues that instead of representing bottom-up develop-
ment, education NGOs, comprising elite sections of society, deflect social movements
against the neoliberal state.
Ismail and Kamat (2018) underscore the importance of the role NGOs play in increas-
ingly neoliberal and authoritarian contexts. We examine how NGOs navigate concerns of
equity, social justice, and inclusion in their involvement with PPP arrangements. Through
a scoping review of 199 articles covering a range of countries, Verger, Moschetti, and
Fontdevila (2020) examine how vouchers, charter schools, and private school subsidies,
as varied policy options under PPP, create a trade-off between academic achievement
and equity. Thus, the consequences of neoliberal foci on privatisation, competition,
and market values on equity and inclusion are widely debated issues in the growth of
PPP and education privatisation (Ball and Youdell 2007; Verger 2012). However, what is
lesser known are the pedagogical implications on equity and inclusion in the dynamic
between NGOs, the state, and the school in PPP arrangements (Sleegers 2019; Verger,
Moschetti, and Fontdevila 2020).
To understand the involvement of advocacy NGOs in a controversial and contested
PPP policy involving public subsidies to private schools in India, we combine Stein’s
(2004) work on the culture of education policy with theories of justice-oriented inclusion
(Waitoller 2020; Love and Beneke 2021). The culture of policy is a framework that
addresses how policies designed to address inequality inadvertently reinforce and repro-
duce it. Within the United States context, Stein (2004) describes how policies designed to
address inequities construct beneficiaries as deviant, use state apparatus to correct
deviance, and incentivize actors to identify and reinforce deviance. This culture of
policy is represented in schools through rituals and language that stigmatise beneficiaries,
adopt pedagogical approaches that emphasise deficit perspectives, and focus on per-
formance-based measures to determine policy eligibility (Stein 2004). In the original con-
ceptualisation, the culture of education policy represents a two-way process between
schools and policymakers. Expanding this work, we examine the pedagogical implications
of the mediation by NGOs between private schools and the state (Sleegers 2019). We
situate this analysis in existing research on the tensions between market logics and neo-
liberal ideologies with values of equality, inclusion, and social justice (Slee and Allan 2001;
Lingard, Sellar, and Savage 2014; Apple 2017). Neoliberal logics in education focus on per-
formance, standardisation, competition, individual choice, and market-driven reforms.
This transforms the justice-oriented roots of inclusion into neoliberal selective inclusion-
ism (Waitoller 2020), defined as the inclusion of children from groups that are historically
marginalised into school systems without ‘altering the institutions’ norms of belonging
and being’ (91). In contrast, justice-oriented inclusion requires an explicit examination
of norms and practices that reproduce deficit perspective by acknowledging historical
exclusions and addressing systemic barriers to representation, recognition, and redistribu-
tion of justice (Waitoller 2020; Love and Beneke 2021).

NGOs and PPP arrangements in neoliberal India

In the last decade, PPPs have been positioned by the Indian government as a means to
expand access to quality education while ensuring equity and social justice in education
4 T. SARKAR

(Kumari 2016; Srivastava 2016). The 2009 Right to Education Act made education a funda-
mental right for children between the ages of six and 14 and placed obligations on the
state to provide education for all in India. The most contentious provision of the RTE,
Section 12.1.c (Srivastava and Noronha 2014), is described as ‘one of the world’s largest
programs for public funding and private provision in education’ (Sarin, Dongre, and
Wad 2017, 13). The provision, a form of public subsidy to private schools (Verger,
Moschetti, and Fontdevila 2020), requires unaided private schools to enrol at least 25%
of children from ‘socially disadvantaged’ and ‘weaker sections’ in the earliest grade,
with the state reimbursing this cost. More recently, the 2020 National Education Policy,
with its goal as the achievement of SDG 4, promotes the involvement of philanthropic
organisations and the private sector to provide ‘quality education’ (Ministry of Human
Resource Development Government of India 2020).
The growth of private schooling in India created an exclusionary system, marked by
inequality in educational access and learning outcomes, leading to segregation along
lines of economic class, caste, and gender (Moore 2017). The 25% provision is viewed
as ‘India’s new mandate against economic apartheid in schools’ (Juneja 2014) and as a
‘unique kind of public-private partnership’ (Kingdon 2017, 2). The subsidy generated
extensive debate, with some scholars emphasising aspects of efficiency, cost-effective-
ness, and school choice (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2015; Tooley 2016), while
others focusing on the equity, inclusion, and social justice implications for access and par-
ticipation (Juneja 2014; Sarangapani et al. 2014; Sucharita and Sujatha 2019). These
debates are tied to the stated goal of the provision in policy documents is,
Not merely to provide avenues of quality education to poor and disadvantaged children. The
larger objective is to provide a common place … across caste, class and gender divides in
order that it narrows down such divisions in our society. (Ministry of Human Resource Devel-
opment 2012, 8)

In tandem with the growth of PPP in the Indian education system has been a growing
acrimonious relationship between NGOs and the state (Bornstein and Sharma 2016).
These tensions have played out in the cancellation of the registration of over 20,000
organisations to receive foreign funding since 2011 (Centre for Social Impact and Philan-
thropy 2018). The actions taken by the state against NGOs, particularly those receiving
foreign funding, are viewed as ways to ensure that NGOs ‘fall into line’, not question
the government, and restrict civil society action on issues related to human rights,
social justice, and the environment (Thomas et al. 2010; Centre for Social Impact and Phi-
lanthropy 2018; Ismail and Kamat 2018).
Nevertheless, ‘corporate NGOs’ and philanthropic organisations are increasingly
involved in the Indian education system (Subramanian 2018). The reduced involvement
of the state in public education as a result of neoliberal reforms has led to a ‘devolving
of state responsibility onto a network of NGOs and individuals’ (3) who have established
influence and importance in policy circles (Ball 2016; Srivastava 2016).
The influence of philanthropies and networked NGOs in India has been examined as a
transnational advocacy network (TAN) advocating for ‘pro-market, pro-choice’ (Nambis-
san and Ball 2010, 328) education policies. Several scholars have examined the global
policy circles associated with education policy reform in India (Vellanki 2014; Srivastava
2016; Subramanian 2018). Stephen Ball (2016, 2018) has described this network as the
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 5

Indian Education Reform Movement (IERM), a network of philanthropic and NGOs (Ball
2016) that employ ‘techniques of investment, business innovation and performance
management’ (5) to reform public education. IERM members view policy solutions,
such as school choice and school vouchers, as efficient ways to provide access to
‘quality’ education to previously excluded communities. This network is characterised
by a high degree of trust, coherence around the inefficacy of the state, formal and infor-
mal social relations, and connections with global organisations. Although much has
been studied about the networked NGOs and philanthropies promoting neoliberal
reform in education in India, there is little examination of how NGOs associated with
education privatisation and the IERM occupy the ambivalent positioning in an increas-
ingly authoritarian neoliberal regime (Ismail and Kamat 2018). We examine two NGOs
associated with the Indian Education Reform Movement (IERM) who advocate for,
monitor, and implement a state policy to enrol children from marginalised groups in
private schools (Srivastava and Noronha 2014; Mukhopadhyay and Sarangapani
2018). In this way, we further existing research on how NGOs are co-opted by or
resist neoliberal pressures (Ismail and Kamat 2018; Brehm and Silova 2019; Palma Car-
vajal 2021), with a particular focus on the implications for discourses and pedagogy
for equity, inclusion, and social justice.

Method
Case selection
We identified discourses in artifacts produced by NGOs implementing the 25% provision
and are associated with the IERM. The provision and the IERM are connected to the
broader global phenomenon of PPP in education (Robertson et al. 2012; Verger 2012)
and the growing influence of private actors in education policy (Ball and Youdell 2007;
Moschetti et al. 2020).
Two NGOs, the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) and Indus Action, were included as cases
of organisations that advocate for, monitor, and implement Section 12.1.c of the RTE.
Based on the existing literature on corporate NGO networks in India (Nambissan and
Ball 2010; Vellanki 2014; Ball 2016; Subramanian 2018), the two organisations were
selected based on their association with Central Square Foundation (CSF) and Ashish
Dhawan, nodal actors involved in neoliberal education reform in India (Ball 2016; Ball
and Thawer 2018; Miglani and Burch 2021). CSF is an education-focused philanthropic
foundation and think tank. A highly networked and global organisation with a focus on
India, CSF was started by Ashish Dhawan; a central actor within the IERM (Ball 2016).
Ashish Dhawan has served as the chair of the CCS board, while his organisation CSF
has funded projects and reports by Indus Action.
CCS is a policy think-tank based out of New Delhi, founded by Parth Shah in 1997. The
organisation conducts research, advocacy, and training to promote choice and account-
ability across domains. CCS and CSF collectively run RighttoEducation.in, an online portal
dedicated to raising awareness about the RTE Act, with a particular focus on Section 12.
i.c. In addition, CCS has several initiatives to promote school choice and private schools for
the poor in India (Nambissan and Ball 2010), such as National Independent School Alliance
(NISA) and the School Choice Campaign. Particularly relevant to this study is Project
6 T. SARKAR

Patang, a pilot project conducted at two elite private schools in Delhi to support the
inclusion of Section 12. i.c beneficiaries.
Indus Action describes itself as a ‘do-tank’. It is a policy implementation organisation
started in 2013 in New Delhi by Tarun Cherukuri, a former fellow and city director with
Teach for India. The organisation works to raise community-level awareness around
social welfare schemes and partners with state governments to build data systems to
manage policy implementation. A particular policy focus for Indus Action has been the
25% provision. Through the activities described above, the organisation claims to have
ensured the admission of over three hundred thousand children in the last 7 years
with a retention rate of 81%.
We analysed publicly available documents, blogs, and reports from the two organis-
ations about their work on the 25% provision. We developed a corpus of 22 artifacts –
seven from Indus Action and 15 from CCS. We also examined annual reports and
financial statements to develop a greater sense of the organisations’ work. NGO reports
and documents provide important insights into how NGOs represent their beneficiaries
(Bhati and Eikenberry 2016). Further, such artifacts are usually designed as part of
accountability measures, produced for donors, and represent power relations between
different actors associated with NGOs (Ebrahim 2005).

Analytical strategy
We conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the artifacts to examine discursive
strategies and constructions in the NGO documents. CDA addresses language as a
social practice tied to power (Fairclough 2001). It seeks to expose and highlight the
unequal power relations embedded within discourse (Liasidou 2008). We used Gee’s
(2011) building tasks and tools of inquiry and Fairclough’s (2001) processes of description,
explanation, and interpretation to examine ideologies (Fairclough 2001) and figured
worlds (Gee 2011) underlying the role of the NGOs within the 25% policy landscape in
India. Discourse not only represents text but also the social contexts within which texts
are produced and interpreted (Fairclough 2001). CDA goes beyond describing discourses
to put forth interpretations and explanations of discourse that capture institutional and
societal contexts, ideologies, and outcomes associated with discourse. A CDA analysis
of reports and documents can help unpack how NGOs legitimise their work in the
context of broader discourses (Miglani and Burch 2021) and the kinds of power relations
the NGOs are embedded in (Ebrahim 2005).

Findings
‘There is no blame in the system’: establishing neutral expertise in a neoliberal
network
The two NGOs situate themselves between private schools and the state as neutral actors
interested solely in the successful policy implementation. Maintaining neutrality requires
a complex balance to highlight the inadequacies of the state and private schools and
demanding accountability in ways that do not render the NGO-state and NGO- school
relations antagonistic. That is, the NGOs must be clear that there is ‘truly no blame in
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 7

the system’, only a lack of capacity to collect and collate data, manage logistics, and
design processes, pedagogies, and systems required for policy success. The NGOs position
themselves as builders and supporters of implementation capacity for state and private
schools. They do so by demonstrating how neither the state nor private school possesses
the capacity or expertise to implement the policy. For instance, the NGOs agree that the
state has failed in implementing 12.1.c. However, while CCS focuses on the issues of reim-
bursement and recognition for private schools, Indus Action highlights how schools fail to
comply with the provision and how states are unable to monitor school compliance.
The documents frame failures in ‘policy gaps and implementation challenges’ as the
perennial failure of the Indian state ‘between policy implementation and grassroots
implementation’. The NGOs serve to fill this gap by collaborating with the government
through ‘partnerships’ that ‘mobilize’ resources and leadership ‘existing within the
system’. The state is not viewed as negligent, absent, or ignorant – the NGOs only
bolster government resources and provide expertise to the state in ‘data collection, man-
agement, and analytical skills’. Thus, the NGOs walk a tightrope between highlighting the
inadequacies of the state to implement the policy and partnering with and scaling up
across states. The documents mention specific states, such as Delhi, Madhya Pradesh,
Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand, as exemplar state governments who have suc-
ceeded in implementing this policy as a result of their partnerships with the NGOs. Simi-
larly, private schools are seen as incapable of undertaking the steps required for policy
success. Schools are viewed as lacking knowledge and skills to include the policy benefi-
ciaries, uncommitted to ‘fundamental changes in attitudes that would foster inclusion’
and teachers as ill-equipped for inclusion. As a result, the NGOs position themselves as
knowledgeable experts in supporting inclusion within private schools. The kind of exper-
tise that NGOs provide to schools will be discussed in later sections.
A key component of the expertise that the NGOs claim to offer stems from notions of
efficiency, accountability, and effectiveness. The organisations emphasise evidence-based
decision-making and technological solutions for policy implementation. The documents
outline how the organisations invest in developing metrics, promoting data-based
accountability, and conducting evaluation research. Indus Action, for example, highlights
the importance of tracking, storing, and organising databases and management infor-
mation systems as solutions for accountability, transparency, and fairness in policy
implementation. Effectiveness and accountability, understood in terms of data and
cost-cutting, are desirable because of the underlying assumption that this is what dis-
tinguishes the private sector from the state.

‘School choice for the poor’: legitimising educational privatisation

The NGOs describe the provision as ‘a unique public-private partnership model’, a ‘land-
mark’, ‘bold’, and ‘the world’s most ambitious program of public-funded education in
private schools’. NGOs describe the ‘revolutionary idea’ as a progressive, inclusive
policy that will make society ‘more equitable and just’ and will set ‘one crore children
on a different life path’. The belief that this policy will set children on a ‘different life
path’ is based on a consensus that the policy enables ‘school choice for the poor’. The
NGOs view this provision to enable parents to access the ‘private school of their
choice’ ‘even among the disadvantaged’. School choice is considered important given
8 T. SARKAR

the historic and present failures of the state in ensuring access, inclusion, and ‘quality’
education for all children. The Indian state is criticised for the ‘abominable quality of edu-
cation’ which has ignored ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘classroom diversity’ in education
reform and financing. While Indus Action views this as the struggle of India’s welfare
state, CCS highlights state failure to draw a comparison between public and private pro-
visioning of education, arguing that private schools are ‘a better provider of education’.
The discourse on school choice and state failure reference broader debates on the
quality of public versus private schools. CCS holds private schools as ‘good’ and
‘quality’. For CCS, private schools are better because they are ‘cheaper than the govern-
ment’ and ‘more responsive to parents and communities’. On the other hand, Indus
Action views this issue as ‘debatable’ and is largely agnostic about whether education
is public or private; this issue for Indus Action can be ‘overcome’. Yet, CCS and Indus
Action share the view that competition between public and private schools is beneficial
to ensuring ‘quality’ education for all children. In common is the belief that the lack of
access to private schools among the poor constitutes an unacceptable inequity.
Although both NGOs legitimise school choice and privatisation, they do this from
different vantage points. CCS positions itself as a representative of private schools, par-
ticularly low-cost private schools, and supports school vouchers. Section 12.1.c represents
a version of school vouchers. School vouchers are central to CCS’s vision of choice and
accountability as a means to equity, understood as improved learning outcomes for
the poor. That is, quality education is operationalised as measurable learning outcomes,
and school vouchers are seen as the ‘free-market’ solution that improves school quality by
requiring schools to ‘compete for students’. Drawing on the work of economist Milton
Freidman, they argue that such competition would lead students to ‘flock to good
schools and abandon bad ones’, eventually leading to the ‘diversification of students in
school’ through increased options for the poor.
On the other hand, Indus Action views Section 12.1.c as a pragmatic response of the
state given the proliferation of private schools and parental preference for private edu-
cation. The policy is viewed as an attempt by the state to ensure that private schools
‘shoulder’ ‘the responsibility of building a more equitable, harmonious and just society’.
The organisation builds this argument by comparing the ‘increasingly unequal schools
on class lines’ to ‘an economic apartheid’ and ‘racial segregation’ in the United States.
Such a comparison affords Section 12.1.c to be described as a policy for school integration
in India akin to Brown v. Board of Education in the United States. The documents collapse
and merge caste, class, and race. Class is viewed as an additional layer that adds ‘more
cracks to a society stratified along caste lines’. However, all other references to caste-
based discrimination are mythological, referring to the story of Eklavya, a skilled, self-
taught archer belonging to a non-dominant group who was forced to cut off his right
thumb as his fee to Dronacharya, the teacher of the dominant caste Pandavas and Kaur-
avas. This mythological reference is used to symbolise ‘the educational barriers that still
exist today for India’s underprivileged children’. Yet, the benefits of the policy provision
are rooted in discourses of individual economic mobility, allowing children to ‘transcend
all odds’, ‘free themselves from shackles’ and access ‘doors of opportunity’ by escaping
precarity. The absence of structural oppression and exclusion is evident in a document
that lists the ‘objective and advantages of the provision’ as ‘builds empathy in all’, ‘respon-
sibilities of private schools’, ‘one crore in next 5 years’, ‘school choice for poor’, and
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 9

‘learning outcomes’. Overall, regardless of the difference in vantage points, the NGOs
legitimise and support PPP arrangements by employing discourses of access, equity,
inclusion, and social justice.

‘We all belong’: promoting assimilationist pedagogy for social justice

The NGOs position themselves as expert service providers who can support policy
implementation across private schools and the state. A crucial gap that NGOs address
is the lack of capacity of schools and teachers to ‘do inclusion’. The ‘bigger challenge’
identified is that of ‘post-enrolment integration’ since teachers lack the ‘necessary training
to manage’ classroom diversity and lack ‘sensitization’. Our findings highlight how NGOs
legitimise a particular vision of what it means to do inclusion.
The NGOs appeal to empirical evidence that inclusion does not ‘come at the expense of
other students’ and that ‘inclusion benefits everyone’. For example, Indus Action cites the
research of Gautam Rao (2019) to demonstrate how inclusion benefits ‘the other 75%’.
The company of ‘poor classmates’ is reported to make the ‘wealthy students more pro-
social and generous’ and ‘more willing to socially interact with poor children outside
school’. Such arguments refer to broader fear that the children enrolled in private
schools through this policy will harm the competitiveness and achievement standard
of the school. Citing the policy document, Indus Action addresses how the policy is an
‘opportunity’ for the rich to understand ‘the reality of India’ and learn from the ‘knowl-
edge base’ of ‘informal sector knowledge’. The school is viewed as the ‘perfect setting’
to address societal inequalities if only schools create ‘a positive environment’ and teachers
adopt ‘easy to implement practices’ that will result in ‘seamless integration’ of the ‘two
worlds’. The NGOs identify these steps as scalable and easy-to-implement ‘best practices’
and implement them as proof of concept and train teachers to adopt them. Further, the
NGOs demonstrate that inclusion requires ‘mindset’ changes in individual teachers to
address the biases in how they ‘perceive’ and ‘treat’ children who are enrolled through
this provision. Teachers are to be trained and prepared to ‘shift their thinking’ and
‘adapt teaching methods accordingly’. Teachers are reminded that they are ‘responsible
for the performance of all learners’ and that there are ‘no excuses to let any child fail’
and they must not respond to their students’ poverty with ‘resignation and despair’
but with ‘smarter strategies’.
Although there are appeals to values of democracy, social justice, citizenship, and
rights, the broader focus is on ‘individual potential’ and the unique qualities of each
child. To address the tensions between achievement and inclusion, NGOs also appeal
to the idea that intelligence is not ‘innate capacity’ but predicated on ‘individual hard
work and effort’. NGOs console teachers who, although cannot alter the child’s family
context (‘change your student’s bank account’), can change the child through psycho-
social interventions (‘emotional accounts’) by ‘altering the pedagogical nature of the
classroom’. The nature of these interventions, which is the expertise the NGOs offer, is pre-
dicated on a particular construction of the children and families associated with this
policy.
Children are described through deficit-based language. Their academic skills are
‘weak’, and their behaviours are ‘challenging’. Teachers are told to ‘expect students to
be impulsive’ and ‘blurt inappropriate language’. To remedy their behavioural deficits,
10 T. SARKAR

NGOs recommended positive reinforcements, pairing children, and teaching them how to
‘make eye contact’ and ‘basic meet and greet skills’. Such techniques, aimed at managing
children, are described as ‘behaviour management’ and ‘social-emotional learning’.
Further, students’ academic deficits require ‘remedial classes’ as they ‘struggle’ with
their ‘lack of understanding’. English is highlighted as a particularly concerning area of
lack. Parents are constructed as unaware with ‘no formal education or even know how
a classroom looks like’, obliged and grateful to be ‘lottery winners’ who have the ‘oppor-
tunity’ as they are so poor that they cannot afford to ‘feed their family’ and bring up their
children in ‘slums’. Despite these constructions of needy families, teachers are specifically
implored to not attribute low achievement to children’s family backgrounds (‘low aca-
demic results should not be attributed to the economic background of children’). Yet,
the documents attribute weak academics and inappropriate behaviours to lack of par-
ental participation, ‘limited opportunities for exposure’ and lack of support at home,
It is much easier to condemn a student’s behaviour and demand that he or she change it than
it is to help the student change it. Every proper response that you don’t see at your school is
one that you need to be teaching. Rather than telling kids to “be respectful,” demonstrate
appropriate emotional responses and the circumstances in which to use them and allow stu-
dents to practice applying them.

Thus, inclusion in the classroom refers to pedagogical practices that teach poor children
how to behave in ways that the schools and teachers deem appropriate to ‘help the
student to change’. The documents are replete with examples of how teachers
changed the children’s behaviours through ‘positive reinforcement’, ‘individual attention’,
and ‘counselling’ of parents to ‘take interest in their child’s well-being’. Once the children
change their behaviour (‘became sincere’) and are ‘no longer naughty’ they become ‘an
inspiration to all other children’ because of their ‘academic growth’. That is, the children
are deemed acceptable once they conform to the standards of behaviours and academic
achievement placed by the school. Further, the only hindrance described in this process is
the time that it takes for the teacher to enact change and for the child to conform. The
children are deemed too young to both enact or understand discrimination.

Discussion
Our first question addresses how NGOs navigate and legitimise their presence in PPP
arrangements. This question was motivated by scholarship that addresses the ambiva-
lence of NGOs, who are viewed as bottom-up, democratising civil society actors, to
resist or adopt neoliberal values (Ismail and Kamat 2018; Brehm and Silova 2019; Palma
Carvajal 2021). The question is particularly important in the Indian context given the acri-
mony and tension between the state and NGOs, state sanctions against social justice
NGOs that critique or resist the state (Sen 1999; Thomas et al. 2010; Centre for Social
Impact and Philanthropy 2018). Yet, at the same time, PPP arrangements and education
NGOs continue to proliferate (Srivastava 2010; Bornstein and Sharma 2016; Subramanian
2018).
We find that the two NGOs legitimise their presence in two ways. First, by establishing
themselves as neutral actors that possess the expertise to address failures in policy
implementation by both the state and private schools. In line with existing research on
the IERM (Nambissan and Ball 2010; Ball 2016; Subramanian 2020), we find that the
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 11

NGOs share a common vision of technocratic expertise, cost-effectiveness and efficiency,

school choice, accountability, and a notion of quality achievable through ‘best-practices’
and measurable learning outcomes. The second strategy used by NGOs is to support edu-
cation privatisation by deploying discourses of equity and social justice through the
notion of ‘school choice for the poor’. Both NGOs view the 25% provision to ensure
‘school choice for the poor’ and promote competition between the public and private
sectors to improve quality and equity in education.
On the surface, similar to the Chilean experience (Palma Carvajal 2021), both organis-
ations have been co-opted by neoliberal values (Brehm and Silova 2019). Yet, there are
important differences between the two Indian NGOs that require further examination.
The differential nature of PPP that the two NGOs are involved in with the state. CCS
focuses on advocacy and legislation as the means to garner support for private schooling,
particularly low-cost private schools (Nambissan and Ball 2010). For instance, CCS runs
NISA, an advocacy group for low-cost private schools and represents the interests of
private schools to the state. On the other hand, Indus Action partners with different
state governments and organisations to highlight concerns around policy implemen-
tation and develops platforms to ensure fairness in beneficiary eligibility and selection.
Further, Indus Action conducts awareness campaigns, supports parents to apply to
private schools, and follows up with the post-enrolment. Thus, although both organis-
ations are associated with the IERM and are working to advocate for and implement
the 25% provision, their motivations and intentions differ. As Srivastava (2016) argues,
‘the contention here is that privatisation in and of education, hidden or otherwise, may
or may not be the explicit, sole, intentional or indeed, desired outcome for every actor’
(23). While CCS has explicit pro-market inclinations, Indus Action establishes its legitimacy
by describing the policy as the public responsibility of private actors in promoting social
justice. These differences make it difficult to characterise the increased influence of NGOs
in the education sector through over-generalized conclusions about the range of actors
involved in the IERM (Srivastava 2010; 2016; Ball 2016).
Our second question addresses the pedagogical implications of NGO involvement in
PPP arrangements on discourses of equity, inclusion, and social justice. Existing research
on PPP highlights that such arrangements lead to a trade-off between achievement and
equity (Verger, Moschetti, and Fontdevila 2020). However, we know little about how NGO-
school partnerships (Sleegers 2019) and PPP arrangements (Verger, Moschetti, and Font-
devila 2020) affect teaching-learning practices in schools and classrooms. By analysing
NGO documents, particularly sections that demonstrate that offer recommendations to
schools and teachers and those that address the impact of NGO interventions in
schools, our study serves as an important starting point to investigate actual practices
enacted by teachers in schools and classrooms.
By expanding the culture of education policy framework (Stein 2004) to incorporate
relationships between schools-NGOs and the state, we find that NGO documents rep-
resent the policy that deems beneficiary children and families as deficit and deficient. Chil-
dren are described as lacking in academic achievement, displaying inappropriate
behaviours, and teachers are advised to expect challenging behaviours from the children.
These deficits in the children are attributed to parents, described as poor, unable to
provide adequate care for their children yet grateful for the opportunity the policy pro-
vides their families. which reinforces deficit perspectives towards policy beneficiaries
12 T. SARKAR

within school cultures and teacher practices. The present study highlights the growing
role of NGOs in mediating the culture of policy between the school and policy (Sleegers
2019). As described above, the NGOs position themselves as experts, providing technical
know-how to the state to identify and manage policy beneficiaries through processes and
algorithms, and help schools ensure that policy beneficiaries do not disrupt prevailing
norms of achievement and behaviour through techniques and strategies that correct pur-
ported deviance in beneficiary children and families.
One way to situate these deficit constructions of families and children enrolled in
private schools through the 25% provision is in the literature on NGO-donor relationships
and accountability (Ebrahim 2005; Bhati and Eikenberry 2016). The discursive construc-
tions of poor, needy children, and their families, reformed and saved through the inter-
ventions of the could be for the benefit of donors and funders (Ebrahim 2005).
Although donors and funders do not feature in the sets of relationships (Gee 2011)
described in the NGO documents, the reports and documents analysed in the study are
a form of upward accountability to funders and highlight the skewed relations of
power between NGOs and funders. As Ebrahim (2005) notes, ‘the fact that many NGOs
in the South generate annual reports and evaluation documents in English, even
though most of their clientele do not speak this language, suggests that these reports
are generated primarily for external consumption, especially by donors’ (72). That is,
the othering constructions of policy beneficiaries are meant for donors, other NGOs,
state actors, policymakers, and private unaided schools to consume and reflect
broader, acceptable discourses within this policy provision (Miglani and Burch 2021).
Regardless, this renders inclusive and social-justice-oriented pedagogy into a kind of
inclusionism (Waitoller 2020), such that institutional norms are unaltered by children
are expected to assimilate into them. The NGO documents describe the means and knowl-
edge to correct these deficits (Stein 2004). Highlighting learning gaps, behavioural chal-
lenges, and the inability of parents to provide care, the NGO documents reference fears
that private schools have around the 25% provision. Private schools have long-standing
assumptions that children enrolled through this policy disrupt school academic stan-
dards, display delinquent behaviours, and their families cannot provide resources that
their existing clientele can (Sarin and Gupta 2013). To allay these fears in enrolling
policy beneficiaries, organisations fashion inclusion through easy-to-implement best
practices.
The techniques and strategies highlighted by the NGOs require children granted
admission through the 25% provision to assimilate into the school environment.
Despite quoting the policy document that the provision is designed for the ‘75% chil-
dren’ to learn from the 25%, NGO discussions of inclusive practices do not suggest
that the children or their families have existing knowledge, cultures, or practices
that teachers and schools can learn from or value. Instead, children and their families
are only considered worthy once assimilated. The only value-addition of the 25%
families in school is to make the ‘75% children’ more charitable. This form of doing
equality as differential inclusion maintains hierarchical relations and reproduces privi-
lege and is characteristic of elite private schools in India (Sriprakash, Qi, and Singh
2017). CCS’s intervention, Project Patang, was conducted with elite private schools
in New Delhi, and Indus Action’s compendium of best practices largely draws from
such schools.
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 13

By focusing on the individual biases of teachers and ‘easy to implement’ solutions to

inclusion, the NGOs seek to comfort private schools and convince them to implement
the provision. Yet, in doing so, they obfuscate the systemic forces of class and caste
oppression underlying the resistance from private schools, absolve private schools from
their role in reproducing structural inequality, and fail to challenge norms of behaviour
and learning that are based on dominant middle-class values (Love and Beneke 2021).
Further, the NGOs recommend practices such as behaviour management, remediation,
and school readiness approaches, which may reinforce structural challenges and place
blame on individual families and children (Love and Beneke 2021). Inclusion is thus ren-
dered a technical task to assimilate the other, instead of a political project for social justice
(Slee and Allan 2001; Lingard, Sellar, and Savage 2014). However, it is important to note
that the NGOs are only reinforcing what are existing legal and policy frameworks that
deem private schools as charitable institutions (Sarin and Gupta 2013). That is, the
larger framework of the RTE legitimises the ‘marketisation of education and its attendant
individualized “school choice” regime’ (Maithreyi and Sriprakash 2018, 9). Thus, although
the two organisations may have different inclinations towards education privatisation (Sri-
vastava 2016), the resultant effect appears to be an orientation towards teaching and
learning rooted in neoliberal selective inclusionism (Waitoller 2020).

Conclusion
Our study examines two NGOs, Indus Action and CCS, who advocate for and implement
the 25% provision of the RTE in India. While exploratory and limited in generalisability, our
findings provide an in-depth look into NGOs in India and in turn, inform and provide
empirical evidence for the extant theories behind public-funded private education.
Theoretically, our findings echo the literature that demonstrates the ways in which
inclusion and social justice are rendered compatible with neoliberal understandings
(Lingard, Sellar, and Savage 2014; Waitoller 2020). NGO documents construct the policy
as an opportunity for policy beneficiaries to attain economic and social mobility and
establish individual responsibility to overcome poverty to be productive members of
the labour market (Waitoller 2020). Such constructions of inclusion and social justice
diminish structural forms of social justice (Grimaldi 2012).
Empirically, although the two NGOs differ in crucial ways in the extent to which they
operationalise and legitimise education privatisation, our study offers important evidence
highlighting the pedagogical implications of decision-making within social justice dis-
courses. More specifically, we shed light on the peril of teaching-learning practices at
the organisational level that dismisses structural barriers, promote deficit views of chil-
dren from marginalised communities, and require assimilation into existing middle-
class norms of achievement and success.
Our study also raises important questions. First, is it possible to ‘do’ inclusion and social
justice within the existing neoliberal education policy landscape? Can NGOs, while
attempting to legitimise their presence with the state and private schools, engage in
‘thoughtful non-compliance’ (Stein 2004) in the global South? Thoughtful non-compli-
ance requires resisting the culture of policy by reimagining how the policy can meet
student needs without stigmatising difference or reproducing hierarchical relations.
While Stein (2004) argues that this is the work of teachers, one might consider how
14 T. SARKAR

NGOs in India can support or lead these efforts. How might NGOs support schools in
recognising institutional practices that reinforce privilege and exclusion? How can they
challenge dominant discourses – from learning gaps to educational debts (Ladson-Billings
2007), from deficit and deviant children and families to interrogating existing norms and
practices, from quick-fix, technical solutions to situating teacher practices in their cultural
and political implications?
Such reframing and countering practices are not without risks to the NGOs. Although
the Indian state supports NGOs that supplement the work of the state, NGOs engaged in
confronting the state or seeking to disrupt the status quo may face consequences (Sen
1999; Thomas et al. 2010). Under the FCRA rules, NGO operations and accounts are rou-
tinely scrutinised by the state. It is important to note that we cannot claim NGOs are not
resisting the culture of policy. It could be that such acts of resistance occur but are not
documented to adhere to accountability norms of funders. Yet, equally worrying if the
lack of documentation can be attributed to fear of backlash by the state or by the philan-
thropic network. If there is resistance, how is it imagined and achieved in the day-to-day
operations of the NGO with the school and the state? Addressing such questions will lead
to a better understanding of the changing nature of NGOs, locally and globally.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the team at Indus Action for their generous engagement with the
paper. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Tanushree Sarkar is a doctoral candidate in the Community Research and Action program at
Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Her research examines the relationships between education
policy and pedagogy for inclusive and social-justice oriented education in India. Her work draws on
critical disability studies, decolonial and postcolonial studies, policy sociology, and participatory
research methods.
Xiu Cravens is a professor of the practice in education policy and comparative and international
education at the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations. Her scholarly work involves
qualitative and quantitative analyses of reform policies that are particularly related to the organiz-
ational and cultural contexts of schools in the United States and other countries, the role of instruc-
tional leaders in a changing policy environment, best practices in professional development, and
the conceptual and methodological challenges of cross-cultural transfer and generalization of lea-
dership theories and their applications.
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 15

ORCID
Tanushree Sarkar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5997-0886
Xiu Cravens http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3077-9313

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