The Business-Standard reports the following:

Poor parents too prefer private schools (emphasis added)

The paper reports on a survey which concludes that poor people prefer to pay higher fees in private schools rather than sending their children to government schools for a bad education. Even if the government provided vouchers subsidsing half the cost of schooling that would be fine. The conclusion is not a least bit startling but the headline is.

My friend, Atanu Dey has been writing about liberalizing the education sector and vouchers for a long time now. Please read him to understand this issue better. I want to concentrate on a different one.

What startled me was the headline which contained the word “too” implying that like rich people, poor people would prefer quality too. Like the headline writer a lot of people in the communities around the world believe that poor people somehow will be content with inferior quality.

Everybody would want their children to have the best education regardless of econmic status. With 500 million Indians below 25 yrs of age India has a golden once-in-a-lifetime chance to provide a quality education to their children.

Businesses which want to serve the “base of the pyramid” need to understand this in order to succeed in this market.