The 1990s saw a surge in parental demand for education which prompted a new phenomenon, the growth of small fee-charging private schools for the less privileged. While this development has been welcomed by education bureaucrats, there has been little research on these schools, which often because they remained 'unrecognised' even missed statistical surveys. This paper reports a small field study of these schools in one district each in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.