There is a joke told in certain circles in Dehradun: that the city has more Old Boys’ associations than it has functioning traffic lights. This is an exaggeration, but not by much. Dehradun is home to a concentration of elite residential schools that is unmatched anywhere else in India, and the culture these institutions have built over nearly a century has shaped the city in ways that go far beyond their campuses.

At the centre of this story are two schools: The Doon School, founded in 1935, and Welham Girls’ School, founded in 1957. Together, they represent the pinnacle of Indian boarding school education — and they have made Dehradun, for generations of India’s elite, a place associated with a particular kind of formation.

Why Dehradun

The choice of Dehradun for these schools was not accidental. The valley offered what the founders were looking for: a climate moderate enough for year-round outdoor activity, a location at the base of the Himalayas that provided both beauty and a sense of remove from urban distraction, enough space for large campuses, and existing infrastructure from the British colonial establishment. The Forest Research Institute, the Survey of India, and the military presence had already made Dehradun a town of institutions. Schools fit naturally.

The Doon School was founded by Satish Ranjan Das, a Calcutta lawyer who wanted to create an Indian equivalent of the great English public schools — Eton, Harrow, Winchester — but rooted in Indian culture and values. He chose Arthur Foot, an Englishman, as the first headmaster. The school’s early character was explicitly both Indian and British: cricket and kabaddi, English literature and Sanskrit.

The Alumni Networks

What has kept these schools at the top of India’s institutional hierarchy is not simply the quality of education — though that is high — but the networks they create. Doon School alumni have included Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, senior bureaucrats, Supreme Court judges, business leaders, journalists, and film directors. The list is long enough that it begins to feel less like coincidence and more like self-fulfilling prophecy: powerful people send their children to the school where powerful people went, and those children become powerful in part because of who they met at school.

Welham Girls’ has produced an equally remarkable set of alumni, including some of India’s most prominent women in business, politics, and the arts.

The Question of Access

The fees at these schools are substantial — in the range of five to seven lakh rupees per year at present, when all costs are included. This places them out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Indian families. Both schools maintain scholarship programmes, but the number of scholarship students is small relative to the total enrolment.

The question of what it means for a city’s identity to be so defined by institutions that serve only the very privileged is one that Dehradun does not often ask itself. The schools are part of the city’s pride and its economy. But they are also, in a meaningful sense, not really part of the city at all — they are walled worlds that exist alongside Dehradun rather than within it.

The tension between these two realities — the genuine achievement the schools represent and the deep exclusivity on which they rest — is one that is not unique to Dehradun, but is here more visible than most places.