At half past five in the afternoon the children who had been in his class at eleven in the morning arrive at his house, about fourteen of them, and sit on the floor of a room with a blackboard on the wall, and he teaches them the chapter again. Their families pay him between three hundred and eight hundred rupees a month depending on what they can manage, and he adjusts it without being asked, and everyone in the arrangement understands it.
This is described in policy documents as a malpractice. In several states it is formally prohibited. It is close to universal.
I want to argue that calling it corruption has prevented anybody from asking the question underneath it, and that the question is not about ethics at all.
Start with the arithmetic that nobody puts in the sentence. His salary is a government salary at the lower end of the scale. The tuition brings in, in a good month, somewhere between a third and a half again of it. He has two children, one in a nursing college. Remove the tuition and he does not become a more devoted teacher; he becomes a teacher looking for a second job, and the second jobs available to him — a shop, an insurance agency, commission work — would take his evenings just as completely and would take his attention off teaching entirely rather than concentrating it.
The tuition is the second job that is closest to the first one. Of all the ways he could spend five-thirty to eight, it is the one where the hours go into the same children.
Now the harm, which is real, and which the reform position is right about even though I think its remedy is wrong.
If a teacher earns from tuition, he has an interest in there being something left to teach at five-thirty. Nobody has to consciously under-teach for this to bite; it is enough that the pace in a class of fifty-four with one period is set by somebody who knows that the children who matter to his income will get it again in the evening. And the children who cannot pay are in that class too, and for them the eleven o'clock version is the whole of it. That is a genuine transfer from the poorest children in the room to the teacher, and I have watched it, and it is not always subtle.
So the practice has a defensible origin and an indefensible edge, which is the ordinary condition of most things and is not a reason to ban it, because the ban does not touch the origin.
Where the ban goes is predictable and I have watched it in two states. The tuition does not stop. It moves — to a cousin's house, to a coaching centre where he teaches under an arrangement, to a WhatsApp group with a fee collected by somebody else. The prohibition strips away the one useful feature of the current arrangement, which is that it is visible and locally negotiated, and it replaces it with the same transaction conducted through an intermediary who takes a cut and answers to nobody. The child who could not pay is no better off. The teacher is worse off. The centre is new.
What would actually change it is the thing nobody wants to say in a policy document, which is that a teacher's salary is set at a level that assumes a second income, and everybody involved has known this for forty years and has built around it. The tuition economy is not a deviation from the system. It is a load-bearing part of it, and calling it malpractice lets a state that cannot afford to pay teachers describe the consequence as a discipline problem.
I asked him once whether he would stop if the salary doubled. He said yes immediately, and then, after a moment, said that he was not sure, because by now fourteen families expect him at half past five, and that a thing you have done for eleven years is not only a job.