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What is Wrong with the "Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act"
Author(s) : Siddhartha Shome

   

Education, especially universal primary education, is an important part of any civilized society. For us Indians, it is a matter of serious concern that even today, more than sixty years after independence, universal primary education remains a distant dream.

With the stated intention of addressing this sorry situation, and with some prodding from the Supreme Court (especially the judgment in the case Unnikrishnan vs. State of Andhra Pradesh), the parliament of India passed the 86th Constitutional Amendment in 2002, which inserted Article 21A into the Constitution of India, making education a fundamental right (it is numbered "21A" because this right is thought to flow from Article 21, the fundamental right to life and personal liberty). It is worded as follows.

Article 21A. The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine1.

It is important to note that unlike other fundamental rights, the right to education granted by Article 21A is qualified by the phrase "in such manner as the State may, by law, determine".

So what is this law that is supposed to determine the manner in which the fundamental right to education will be provided? Enacted recently by the Indian parliament, this law is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 20092.

Known more commonly, if informally, as the Right to Education Act or the RTE Act, this new law unfortunately leaves much to be desired.

What is in the Right to Education Act?

The basic objective of the RTE Act is stated as follows: "Every child of the age of six to fourteen years shall have a right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school till completion of elementary education."

In order to meet this objective, the RTE Act requires state and local governments to establish a school in each prescribed neighbourhood within a period of three years of the commencement of this Act. Certain minimum standards of physical infrastructure (number of classrooms, a playground, a library, etc.), as well as the teacher-student ratio are specified in the Act. The delineation of neighbourhoods is left to the State Governments.

An "academic authority established by the Central Government" is to establish minimum qualifications required for teachers.

After the commencement of this Act, each privately run school, however small it may be, whether aided (i.e., receiving government aid or grants) or unaided, will be required to obtain a certificate of recognition from a certifying authority to be set up by each State Government. Privately run schools will be required to meet the minimum infrastructure and teacher-student ratio specified in the RTE Act, and the teacher qualification requirements laid down by the central academic authority, in order to be considered for recognition by the certifying authority.

The RTE Act requires each school (except privately run unaided schools) is to set up a School Management Committee (SMC) consisting of "elected representatives of the local authority, parents or guardians of children admitted in such school and teachers" to monitor the working of the school and prepare school development plans.

The Act mandates that all privately run schools as well as "specified category" government run schools (Kendriya Vidyalayas, Sainik Schools, etc.) must set aside at least 25% of their seats for children belonging to weaker sections and disadvanged groups in the neighbourhood, and must provide them free education, for which these schools will be reimbursed by the government.

Deeply Flawed

At first glance, the RTE Bill may appear to be promising. There are, however, very serious flaws in this Act.

Excessively Government Centric

In my opinion the biggest problem with the RTE Act is that it envisages a government centric system of primary education run directly by the state or local (Municipal Corporation, Zila Parishad, Panchayat, etc.) governments, with hardly any scope for private citizens' initiatives. Government bodies are made responsible for everything from selecting sites for schools, to constructing school buildings, to designating catchment areas for schools (by delineating 'neighbourhoods'), to appointing teachers and school administrators.

Now, I am not one of those who believe that all government intervention is necessarily bad. I feel that in many situations government action can useful, and is sometimes even essential. However, I feel that proper role of the government is to act as an enabler, expanding the scope of citizens' initiatives, rather than as an inhibitor stifling private initiative.

In primary education, it is important for the government provide funds, and also set up a basic regulatory mechanism, but excessive government involvement in day-to-day running of schools might actually hinder rather than help the cause of universal primary education.

Lack of Choice

Parents, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, will go to almost any lengths for the sake of their children's education. Making more educational choices available and affordable will automatically improve the quality of primary education, because, given a choice, parents are sure to choose the one that is best for their children. However, the RTE Act seeks to minimize educational choice. The power to take decisions on almost any issue related to primary education is taken away from parents and vested with the government bureaucracy. According to the RTE Act,

Comments (3) We welcome your comments
Nice article. Like to explore the possibility of how private schools catering mainly to poor can get govt. funding due to unintended RTE consequence. The fact that as it is a law, how about forcing the govt. to own up to it. What needs to be done?
Posted By Rajesh Swaminathan On Date: 24 Jan 2010
The 25% of government sponsored students in private schools is a form of a voucher program. Except for the top elite schools, most budget private schools would be happy to take these students and have a guaranteed income from govt sponsorship. See www.schoolchoice.in for more discussion on this important aspect of the RTE.
Posted By Parth On Date: 25 Jan 2010
In his excellent synopsis of the The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, Shome decries two aspects of the new law: its open antagonism to private budget schools and its cavalier disregard for government accountability. Shome discusses the impact these policies on children’s education but does not analyse the factors that led the government adopt them.
Let me hazard some views on the reasons behind the administration’s policy approach. I feel that understanding these reasons will provide us with a perspective on its overall attitude to the public school sector. Without such insight civil society will hobble its efforts to help the poor.
The explanation for the government’s hostility to low-cost schools is really quite simple. The educational establishment, worried about the budget private school industry’s growing popularity, wants to put a brake on its growth. Under the current set up the major beneficiaries of the system are not students but state bureaucrats, public school teachers and district and state politicians. The way the system works today, or for that matter doesn’t work, is financially and politically very rewarding for these state functionaries. They will, therefore, do everything possible to retain their near monopoly control over mass education. Enacting unrealistically high standards and imposing draconian penalties for violating them, as the RTE does, is part of their strategy to stifle the private shoe-string school industry whose growth, if unimpeded, could threaten their political positions and cushy jobs.
For this reason I smell the malign influence of the education lobby in the Act’s development. One example of this influence relates to a recommendation of the Central Advisory Board of Education on teacher accountability. This Board, which was charged with preparing the first draft of the Act, proposed giving local authorities a say in the appointment, discipline and pay of school instructors. This accountability provision is conspicuously missing from the final Bill. Who benefits from this omission but the teaching fraternities and their political overseers?
The omission is particularly distressing because many studies cite private schools’ greater teacher accountability as one of the main reasons why they routinely outperform government institutions. These private schools, after all, don’t have much else going for them. They are rather rudimentary operations: their infrastructure is often worse than that of public schools; they hire less qualified teachers and pay them one-fifth to one-tenth the amount government sector teachers earn. But they are 175 times more likely to fire teachers for chronic absenteeism than government schools. With their ironclad job security, public school instructors lead a charmed life. They are hardly ever sanctioned for shirking their duties even though teacher truancy rates in India are among the highest in the world.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that teacher groups, determined to hold on to the status quo, would have campaigned furiously behind the scenes to exclude accountability provisions from the RTE. The fact that these measures were left out despite the crucial role they could play in improving the government school system’s performance illustrates the public’s impotence when confronted with establishment interests. In this respect Shome makes a revealing point: the general public was not even consulted during deliberations on the Act.
The administration’s disingenuous approach to universal education is apparent in another part of the RTE Act. The provision in question, section 37, bars people from taking legal action against the government when it fails to fulfill its obligations under the Act. Shome deplores this provision for cutting off parents’ right to seek relief from the courts. My concern reaches deeper than that. It leads me to wonder about the true purpose of the legislation and the government’s motives for enacting it.
First of all the nature of the statute raises a basic question: Why did the administration choose a universal rights approach knowing full well it could not ensure these rights in all parts of the country? After all the security situation in vast stretches of Bihar, Orissa, Arunachal Pradesh and other regions is so poor that public services can’t safely be provided there. Even in the rest of the country, where conditions are more normal, the state-run system, with some honourable exceptions, is in such disarray that a large proportion of schools fall far short of the Act’s standards. Hence the need for the escape hatch provided by section 37. Without it the government agencies would be deluged with legal actions they would lose.
This escape hatch makes a mockery of the statute. While the title of the Act promises a transformational piece of legislation – such as the Civil Rights Act in the U.S. – section 37 betrays this promise and turns the law into a grand but hollow gesture. From the government’s point of view, however, the legislation serves an important function. It allows the administration to claim, without making any difficult political decisions or committing any funds, that it has fulfilled its obligation to provide free and compulsory education to children as required under Article 21A of the Constitution. It gets the pesky Supreme Court off its back.
I believe that the main purpose of RTE was not to address the problems facing children’s education but to sweep them under the carpet. Had government members felt a burning desire to upgrade the public school sector they could have done so by reforming the system and pumping more money into it – without enacting new legislation. But that would have required them to reorder some of their spending priorities and, more importantly, take on the entrenched educational establishment.
In India shaking up existing state agencies, such as the ones running public schools, redefining their operations and reshaping their role is a virtually insurmountable task. Governments haven’t the stomach or the strength of purpose to take on such a challenge. In any case there is usually no separation between entrenched interests and the administration – entrenched interests are the administration. The government’s blanket rejection of the Central Advisory Board of Education’s proposal to strengthen teacher accountability rules is a testimony to this cosy relationship. This rejection also shows how unmoved the government is by the principle of public interest, particularly when the poor are involved. In fact, the country’s officialdom is so insulated from the indigent masses by vested interests that it has become stone deaf to their needs and longings.
In view of this reality, what strategy should civil society organizations use to bolster mass education? Can lobbying the government produce results? The utterance of a village head vividly expresses my sentiments on this subject. Asked why he didn’t send his children to a government school, he answered: “By the time I am able to reform this school, my children’s future would have been damaged irreparably”. Exactly! As the headman’s response implied, campaigning for a good publicly-run education system is bound to be, at best, an inefficient use of resources and, at worst, a time-consuming waste. Such efforts may produce individual programs benefitting small pockets of poor people but these initiatives will remain fragmented and small scale so as not to endanger the status quo. With that in mind, I am less hopeful than Shome that the Act will spur the growth of government financed school voucher systems which in turn will provide more children access to quality private or non-profit educational institutions. In my opinion state functionaries will find clever ways to impede the widespread use of vouchers. I hope I am wrong. But time will tell.
Given this context NGOs energies would be better used to nurture the private budget school sector – helping to build its members’ capabilities and boost their performance – than in campaigning for more government action. They could show their support by providing micro-loans to schools with potential for growth and development; by helping to fend off predatory enforcement officials; by offering technical assistance to promising educational enterprises; and by setting up voucher programs for schools which may not meet government criteria, but are run competently and have achieved satisfactory scholastic results.
This is by way of whole-heartedly endorsing Shome’s assertion that universal primary education can never be achieved by shutting down low-cost private schools but rather by enabling them to improve and flourish.

Posted By Satish Dhar On Date: 22 Feb 2010
 
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