My children are schooled in India (albeit at a top fee paying school). My daughter is 4 and my son is 8. I do not envy my son's school existence at all, and it is vastly different from my experience in the UK ( I was lucky enough to be grammar school educated).
School timings are 08:00 to 15:00 six days a week, and on top of that around an hours homework every night, with around 3 hours at the weekend.
This puts a massive amount of pressure on my wife to support my son, and with this there is a massive amount of pressure to succeed and compete. In India the mentality of middle class families is that their children will be competing against western children for employment opportunities so they need to ensure that they are a step ahead.
Its too much, and I question the impact it has on my son.
He is missing out on the opportunity to be a child.
We are considering changing him to another school with a different and (to me) radical methodology. The principle that children should learn at their own pace and more importantly learn what they want to and how they want to. We have a friend, and their son goes there and he loves it (of course he would), a lot of free time and no homework. According to the school's metric (exam performance) it performs well and more than holds its own, so why are we reluctant? Quite simply because as parents we have been brainwashed to believe that education can only follow a specific format to achieve results, following this method puts a massive amount of trust in a system with my son's future.