Paper short abstract:

I discuss the use of the Right to Information Act to unpack the PPP model of a prominent corporate-funded transnational education intervention – the Teach for India programme, operating in under-resourced and under-served public schools across eight cities in the country.

Paper long abstract:

The developmental thrust of the Indian state post-liberalisation of the economy has shifted considerably over the past four decades (Gupta & Sivaramakrishnan, 2011; Sharma & Gupta 2006). Increasingly, private actors and corporate organisations are being called upon to direct reforms through Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in sectors such as education, health and urban governance (Subramanian, 2022; Ball, 2016; Ghertner, 2011; Banerjee-Guha, 2009). In this paper, I discuss the challenges of tracing the functioning of a prominent corporate supported transnational education intervention – the Teach for India (TFI) programme that operates in under-resourced and under-served public schools across eight cities in the country (Subramanian, 2019). Through the use of the Right to Information Act, a significant legislation that allows Indian citizens to access information on institutions and organisations under public authority, I piece together the ambiguous legalities and accountabilities of private sector driven reforms in public education.

The first part of the discussion interrogates my position and experience of filing applications and engaging with the state bureaucracy to access documents and correspondence on the TFI programme that is not available in the public domain. While private interventions such as TFI are lauded for their philanthropic vision, there is little concern for what these engagements mean for the subjects of the reform – the children of marginalised and working-class families’ studying in the under-resourced public-school system. I explore the dilemmas of piecing together the multiple tiers of policy discourses and their contradicting meanings to comprehend the politics of PPP-driven reforms in practice.