Short read: Mumbai’s BMC is running schools offering free Cambridge and IB education, and parents are lining up

One area where Indians excel is in creating caste systems. So, within a generation of the economy being opened up to the wider world, India created a three-tier education. The lowest tier is free government schools for the poor. The second tier consists of fee-paying schools affiliated to Indian boards like CBSE, SSC and ICSSE. This tier is for the middle class. And for the elite came international boards like Cambridge and IB. Now, as is the norm in other spheres of life, the government is stepping in and trying to break this new caste system. The ‘government’ question here is Mumbai’s Municipal Corporation, BMC. This is what the BMC is doing:

“From midday meals to protein bars for students, BMC’s IGCSE and IB schools in Matunga and Vile Parle are quietly rewriting expectations of what a municipal school can be….

LK Waghji School in Mumbai’s Matunga… is the only IGCSE school run by any civic body in Maharashtra. And its counterpart, the Vile Parle International School — affiliated to the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme — is the only IB school in Mumbai’s western suburbs to be run by a municipal body. Both offer education up to primary classes so far.

Together, they form the frontline of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s experiment to bring world-class schooling within reach of the city’s children, regardless of their parents’ income and background.”

So where did this idea come from? From Delhi says The Print: “The push to introduce IGCSE and IB boards in Mumbai was initiated in 2021 by the then Maha Vikas Aghadi government, which modelled the project on Delhi’s publicly run schools under the Aam Aadmi Party. The same year, then-AAP government in the capital had launched its own IB-affiliated public school.

Accordingly, the two schools were rebranded Mumbai Public Schools by BMC to signal the shift in ambition.”

Have the Mumbai elite hijacked these schools and used their muscle to get their kids admitted here? Not yet it would appear: “Staff at LK Waghji told ThePrint that their students are from mixed backgrounds: children of central and state government officers sit alongside those of mantralaya employees, and middle-class and lower-income families.”

And what is the demand for such schools? Through the roof as you would expect even though most of the parents don’t know how they will be able to finance overseas university education for their children:

“Every year, the IB school receives 400 to 500 applications for students who want to enrol in classes 1 to 4. The IGCSE school receives upwards of 200 applications for classes 1 to 5, and roughly 100 for just 30 pre-primary seats available here.

Under Cambridge norms, each class is to be capped at 20 students—though BMC has been granted leeway to admit up to 30, with a student-teacher ratio of 40:1.

With only one division per standard and seven specially trained teachers at LK Waghji, demand invariably outstrips capacity.”

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