The portal is live. Delhi’s Directorate of Education just flipped the switch on the 2025-26 admission cycle for private school seats under the Right to Education (RTE) quota. It’s a annual ritual of digital hope and bureaucratic dread. On paper, it’s a noble endeavor: 25 percent of seats in fancy private schools reserved for kids from Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Disadvantaged Groups (DG). In practice, it’s a high-stakes lottery where the prize is a shot at the middle class and the entry fee is a stable 5G connection most applicants can’t afford.

Let’s look at the mechanics. If you’re a parent in Delhi earning less than one lakh rupees a year, you now have to navigate a website that likely wasn't built with mobile-first responsiveness in mind. You’re expected to upload documents, navigate drop-down menus, and pray the server doesn't time out while you’re halfway through entering a 12-digit Aadhaar number. It’s the ultimate irony of the modern Indian state: to prove you are poor enough to need help, you must first master the digital tools of the affluent.

The tech isn’t the only hurdle. It’s just the most visible one.

Every year, we see the same friction. Private school associations grumble about "autonomy" and "financial strain." They complain that the government’s reimbursement per student—roughly 2,700 rupees a month—doesn't even cover the cost of the air conditioning in the principal's office, let alone the "holistic" extras they charge the paying parents for. The schools see these kids as a line item that doesn't add up. The government sees the schools as a release valve for a public education system that’s been gasping for air for decades.

And then there’s the Aadhaar of it all. The system demands biometric verification. If the spelling of a child’s name on a birth certificate differs by a single vowel from the entry in the national database, the system rejects the application. No human to talk to. Just a red error message on a flickering smartphone screen. This isn't a bug; for a bloated bureaucracy, it’s a feature. It thins the herd before the computerized draw even happens.

The "draw of lots" is the climax of this digital theater. It’s handled by an algorithm that supposedly ensures fairness. But there’s zero transparency on how that code actually works. Is it truly random? Does it prioritize distance correctly? Nobody knows. Parents just wait for an SMS that might never come. If you win, you get to send your kid to a school where the uniforms cost more than your monthly rent. If you lose, it’s back to the crumbling infrastructure of the local government primary, or worse, a "budget" private school that’s just a storefront with a chalkboard.

We’re told this move to an online system is about "transparency" and "removing middlemen." Sure. It’s much harder for a local politician to slide a bribe to a server than to a clerk. But we’ve replaced the human middleman with a digital gatekeeper that’s just as cold and twice as confusing. The tech doesn't solve the underlying problem; it just dresses the inequality in a new outfit.

There’s a specific kind of cruelty in telling a family they have a right to a seat in a top-tier school, then making them fight a buggy interface to claim it. It’s like offering a starving man a seat at a banquet, but only if he can solve a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded. The Directorate of Education will brag about the number of applications received—likely in the hundreds of thousands—as a sign of success. They won't mention the thousands who gave up when the "Submit" button refused to click.

So, the portal stays open for a few weeks. The servers will groan under the weight of desperate clicks. The elite schools will look for legal loopholes to keep their "brand" pristine. And the government will pat itself on the back for "digitizing" social justice. It’s a slick, efficient way to manage a crisis without actually fixing it.

After all, if the algorithm decides a child’s future, no one has to feel guilty when the "Sorry, No Seat Allotted" message pops up. It’s just data, right?

One has to wonder if the people who designed this system have ever actually tried to use it on a three-year-old Android phone with a cracked screen in a neighborhood where the power cuts out four times a day. If they did, would the "Submit" button still feel like progress? Or does the system work exactly as intended by making the exit door just as hard to find as the entrance?