NEW DELHI — Is that her mother or her maid?

That was the question a little girl asked out loud about the woman who had accompanied her schoolmate to a birthday party. In any segment of the Indian urban population, the visual distinction between mothers and maids is sacred. The maids look impoverished and servile, and in a room filled with the master class they are encouraged to achieve invisibility.

The target of the question at the party was of modest means, but she was with the affluent mothers — like an equal, which she was. Her child was a beneficiary of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, which took effect in 2010. The act requires that all private schools in India, except those run by and for minority communities, reserve 25 percent of their seats for children in the neighborhood who are from 6 to 14 years of age and socially or financially disadvantaged. The schools must also provide this education free.

In affluent parts of Indian society, such students are known as “E.W.S.” (Economically Weaker Section), an abbreviation that is spoken in hushed tones.

Long before the act came into force, there was opposition to it. The gracious reasoning of the middle class was that the poor, once uprooted from their islands of poverty, would be made to feel small. The more practical reasoning was that schools would raise fees for paying students to make up for the loss of revenue, or increase enrollments, thereby diminishing the quality of education. Also, there was a fear that their children might contract diseases from the poor.