Since the 1990s, private providers have made a significant contribution to increasing the size of the schooling marketplace. However, qualitative data collected as part of the probe Revisited survey in 2006-07 reveals that the expanded school market has become a new locus along which existing social inequalities are being reproduced and entrenched. An analysis of the dynamics of schooling choice in a village in Rajasthan attempts to answer the following questions. One, what determines schooling choice? Two, what is the relationship between the expanded school market and schooling quality within and between government and private schools? The paper thus provides a rich and detailed account of how an expanded school market changes the institutional culture within which parents make decisions about schooling and how education is affecting patterns of social disadvantage.
