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Over the last forty years, the Government of India has rapidly expanded access to primary education. As a result, India has achieved near-universal enrollment in education, previously a pox on India's social development record. At the same time, there has been an explosion in private education. What explains this double movement? I argue that the expansion of government education in a society marked by caste hierarchies has led to the exit of upper caste groups to private schools and a decrease in state-level public funding for governmentm education. Together, they help explain the case of Indian education that exhibits high enrollment, high aspirations, high private school access, and low quality.

Emmerich Davies is a research fellow at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He works on comparative politics with a regional focus on South Asia and comparative work in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. He is interested in the politics of service provision and bureaucratic politics. His work has been published in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Governance, and his work has won awards from the Comparative and International Education Society. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, and his B.A. in political science and economics from Stanford University.

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