NEW DELHI — Pradeep Paswan skipped school for weeks, sometimes months. His tin-ceilinged classrooms were scorching hot in the summer. The bathrooms were filthy.
Now he gets dressed at 7 in the morning, in a blue shirt and pants, eager to go to school, in a new building where the toilets are clean. “I come to school because I know I can become something,” said 20-year-old Mr. Paswan, who is in the twelfth grade and dreams of becoming a top official in India’s elite bureaucracy.
In India, where millions of families seek education to break the cycle of poverty, public schools have long had a reputation for dilapidated buildings, mismanagement, poor education and even spoiled lunches. Mr. Paswan’s school, in a working-class neighborhood in Delhi, was known as ‘the red school’ because of the frequent fights on campus and the color of the uniforms.
Today it is a highly sought after school, benefiting from the wider transformation of Delhi’s education system. Last year, 100 percent of students at the school who took the standardized exams for grades 10 and 12 passed, compared to 89 percent and 82 percent in 2014. The red uniforms have been swapped out for navy blue and lavender.
The Aam Aadmi party came to power in Delhi with the promise to improve basic services: health, electricity, water and education. The party’s leader, Arvind Kejriwal, who became Delhi’s chief minister in 2015, said he wanted to “renew” the system to a point where government ministers would feel comfortable sending their children to public schools. .
Mr Kejriwal contributed billions of additional dollars to renovate schools, some of which until recently had no drinking water or had been invaded by snakes. The school system worked with top experts and universities to design new curricula and worked with parents, students and teachers to improve day-to-day activities.
“The first strong point Delhi has identified is that our children are worth it, our schools are worth it and our teachers are worth it,” said Padma Sarangapani, a professor of education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.
The school system is still a work in progress, with a student-to-teacher ratio in some schools and many buildings still in need of basic upgrades. But Mr Kejriwal is making headway, announcing in December that 250,000 students had left private schools to attend government schools in the past five years. (Some of them moved to public schools because of pandemic-related losses in household income.)
Nearly 100 percent of students who appeared for their high school final exams last year passed, compared to 87 percent who appeared in 2012, according to data from the Delhi government. And other state governments, including Telangana and Tamil Nadu, are now pushing to adopt “the Delhi model”.
The work on education has helped the party, which took control of India’s second state, Punjab, in March, have won solid political victories. The party is following its approach across the country, campaigning this year on a platform for education and basic services in state elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat.
The transformation of the schools in Delhi started in 2015 with surprise visits from Manish Sisodia, Mr Kejriwal’s education minister, and his then chief education adviser, Atishi. The two were said to question school officials, pointing to dilapidated classrooms, misleading records and leaking faucets.
“You would enter a school and you could smell the toilets 50 meters away,” said Ms. Atishi, who goes by one name. “The message was that if the government can’t even clean schools, how seriously does the government take education?”
The government enlisted private companies to clean hundreds of schools. It hired retired defense personnel as “estate managers” who oversaw repairs. The estate managers freed school principals to focus on academic work.
Between 2015 and 2021, the Delhi government spent about $10 billion (769 billion rupees) on the 1,037 schools it runs, which serve about 1.8 million students. That was more than double what previous governments, which did not see education as an election-winning issue, spent in the previous seven years, according to data from the Delhi government.
The new money was used to build new classrooms, labs and athletics tracks, as well as to develop curricula and establish a new education council.
Officials also tried to address a fundamental problem: a lack of trust between students, teachers and parents.
In 2016, the Delhi government established school management committees, groups of parents, teachers and local officials to provide a platform for raising concerns and holding the government accountable.
In monthly meetings, school principals and teachers discussed performance and issues and asked permission for new purchases or repairs. The government allowed the committees to hire teachers on an interim basis during the long process to fill the posts permanently.
Investments were also made in teaching staff. Some were absent or left school in the middle of the day, or were even knitted sweaters during classes, government officials said.
Changing attitudes in a system that has long been stagnant required a different approach, said Education Minister Mr. Sisodia.
In the summer of 2016, the government provided training courses with more than 25,000 teachers. In addition to the usual subject matter training, it selected teachers from the public school system to provide training on the basics of teaching.
Those sessions focused on building a personal connection with students. For example, teachers were encouraged to talk to students about their family backgrounds to understand if this was hindering their ability to focus on class work.
“I felt strong,” said Anita Singh, a teacher who took the course and went to a public school herself. “There was an awareness that, as a teacher, if I think about this and make it a part of everyday learning, the students will get the actual learning.”
A year later, the government sent a teacher from nearly every school in the city for further training at world-class institutions, including the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Education in Singapore.
“We got exposure and I gained more confidence,” said Atul Kumar, who attended a week-long training session in London.
Until six months ago, Dr. Kumar the headmaster of Sarvodaya Vidyalaya, the public school where Mr. Paswan is studying. dr. Kumar said the school is now rejecting applications. Applicants far exceed the school’s capacity of 3,500 students, said Zennet Lakra, the vice principal.
One recent afternoon, Indu Devi, a parent, stopped by Ms. Lakra’s office to allow her 17-year-old son, Sanjay Kumar, to be re-admitted after almost two years out of school. Ms Devi, who works as a housekeeper, explained that the family needed him to work during the pandemic.
“I want him to study at this school because it has a name,” she said. “I want him to do better than me.”
In addition to regular subjects, students learn gardening and how to be happy and mindful, as part of an effort to promote “humane values” and reduce the emphasis on rote learning.
Delhi’s education system appears to be working, experts say. In 2017 and 2021, according to surveys by the Ministry of Education, the city’s students achieved significantly better scores than their peers across the country in English, natural sciences, mathematics and social sciences.
Yet challenges remain. Teachers and staff members complain about salaries and allowances that have not been increased for years. It was also difficult to get children back to school after two pandemic years.
About 150 students dropped out at Mr Paswan’s school. Many who returned have “forgotten how to write their names,” said Ms. Lakra.
One school evening around 1am, Mr. Paswan, who works part-time as a garbage collector to earn money for his family, dragged his bike trailer, filled with cardboard and plastic, to the small shack where his family lives. He spent about six hours collecting and sifting through trash cans at subway stations, salons and gyms.
His body was tired and his eyes were bloodshot, but instead of crawling into his hard bed, he opened his Sanskrit notebook to start reading.
“My school helps me,” said Mr. Paswan, who is 20 years older than most of his classmates because he started school late and skipped a year. “I can dream of doing something big, a job with respect.”