Paper short abstract:

This paper describes the the implementation in Lucknow, India, of an education policy by a network of state, civil society, and private sector actors. This 'hybrid state' expands the reach of the state and regulates the poor by embedding them within an ethos of consumer citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

India's Right to Education Act (2009) contains a provision - Section 12(1)(c) - that requires all private schools to educate underprivileged children for free. This policy aims to create a more diverse student body in private schools, each of which typically caters to families within a very narrow socio-economic range due to differential school fees and selection processes. Section 12(1)(c) is in effect a public-private partnership with the state reimbursing private schools for each 'Right to Education' or 'RTE' child enrolled. Drawing on several months of ethnographic fieldwork in the North Indian city of Lucknow, this paper describes the complex network of state agents, development professionals, private school personnel and parent activists involved in the implementation of this policy. I demonstrate that this seemingly radical policy has not destabilised the notion that education is a commodity and people have a right only to the education they can afford. Consistent with other scholarship on India's turn to rights-bases legislation, Section 12(1)(c) appears to facilitate rather than counteract the neoliberalisation of the state, regulating the poor by embedding them within an ethos of consumer citizenship rather than challenging the unequal structures of India's heavily privatised education system. This is a reconfiguration rather than shrinking of state power as boundaries between state, civil society and private sector become blurred and tensions arise between the privatisation of a public good (education) and state capture of private goods (private schools).