India's school of maharajas now educating new elite

Stepping through the gates of India's Mayo College is like journeying back 150 years. Yet, the school that was once reserved for princes now educates a new elite.

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Its history echoes with grandeur. The first student, the son of the Maharajah of Alwar, arrived in 1875 with pomp, seated in a palanquin and accompanied by 300 servants.

"We try to preserve a certain tradition of the past," said Saurav Sinha, principal of the school in Rajasthan's Ajmer.

"But only to the extent it enriches our culture, and lets our students remember who they are, and where they come from."

Nicknamed the "Eton of the East" and modelled after England's elite boarding schools, Mayo was founded by the British viceroy, the Earl of Mayo, with the aim of fostering relations between Indian royalty and London.

Today, among its 850 students aged nine to 18, only a few are descendants of royalty.

They have been succeeded by the scions of ministers, business magnates, diplomats and senior army officers. Tuition fees run to around $11,500 a year a fortune in a country where annual per capita income is about $2,300.

This places Mayo among a rarefied dozen elite boarding schools in India a stark contrast to the nearly 1.5 million other educational institutions in the world's most populous nation, where more than two-fifths lack computers. For many families, the cost is justified.