By Nisha Singh
Every evening in a village in Bihar, a mason hands over a few hundred rupees to the local tutor, after already paying for his son's schooling at the government school down the road.
The school is free. Learning, apparently, is not.
A government school family in rural India spends ₹9,500 a year sending a son to school. Almost three-quarters of that amount again, ₹7,300, goes straight to a private tutor for the same child, the same subjects, the same school year. Urban households spend roughly three times more on schooling and about half of that goes to tuition on top of it.
I call this the Aspiration Tax. Nobody legislates it. Nobody collects it in one place. Almost every Indian family pays it anyway, quietly, every single month.
This is not just a coaching story. It is a story about trust and what happens when a country stops trusting its own classrooms. Families are no longer paying for an advantage. They are paying against the fear that school alone will not be enough.
The numbers are too large now to wave away. According to the 2025 National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), households spend an average of ₹22,024 a year per school-going child. Private coaching eats up 40.7% of that figure. Government school families carry the heaviest load of all; they spend 29 to 46% of their education budget on coaching, against just 8 to 20% for private-school families. The lower the quality of schooling, the more families spend outside the classroom.
Having tracked India's skilling and employability landscape for years, the part that troubles me is the slope of this curve. Rural households put nearly three-quarters of their schooling budget into tuition just to keep pace. Urban households spend more in absolute terms but a smaller share of their total budget. So the family with the least cushion absorbs the heaviest weight. That is not a side effect. That is how the system is built.
It also starts earlier every year. Coaching used to be a Class 11 decision, taken in the shadow of a board exam. Today, 27% of all school students attend private coaching, many of them years before competition should mean anything to a child.
A five-year-old with a tuition timetable is no longer unusual. It is routine.
This trend has been building for decades, not months. Research tracking NSSO consumption data over time shows lower-income households spending a steadily rising share of their income on education, even as wealthier households still spend more in absolute rupees. India wrote free, compulsory schooling into its Constitution. What it built in practice is a system where "free" gets a child halfway there, and a private tutor finishes the job for those who can pay.
Families are paying twice: once through taxes that fund schools and again through tuition to make those schools work.
We measure rising enrolment and call it progress. We rarely ask what families had to spend, quietly and separately, to make that enrolment mean anything.
No single school, coaching brand or parent is to blame for this. It is a slow, collective admission that the classroom alone can no longer be trusted to deliver what it promises. Until that trust is rebuilt through better-resourced schools, accountable teaching and curricula that match what children actually need, the Aspiration Tax will continue to land in households that have already paid once.
India does not have an aspiration crisis. It has a trust crisis. Until classrooms earn back that trust, millions of parents will continue paying twice for an education that was always meant to come with one bill.
Nisha Singh
About Author : Nisha Singh is a policy analyst under MSDE, working at the intersection of skilling, employability and workforce development. Views expressed are her own.
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