THE BATTLE FOR THE SCHOOL
by Pranjali Bandhu
14 August 2009
It is universally accepted that education is a basic right of every child and he/she should have access to it (United Nations Child Rights Convention, 1989). Free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years is a Directive Principle of State Policy in the Indian Constitution. Directive principles are guidelines to the Central and State governments for making laws to establish a just society. This right of education for all was meant to be realized in 10 years after the founding of the Indian republic in 1950. Yet it is only now, after around 60 years have passed, that this directive principle has come close to being legislated into a binding Act.
The 86th Constitution Amendment in 2002 had made the desirable goal of education for all children from the ages of 6-14 into a legally enforceable right by inserting a new Article 21-A. This amendment was only a step towards formulating rules to operationalise the constitutional provisions. This is the aim of the current Right to Free and Compulsory Education bill that has now been passed by parliament. Presidential assent is still awaited.
The salient features in outline of this Bill are as follows:
1. Every child aged 6-14 years has a right to full-time elementary education (from the 1st to the 8th standard) in a formal neighbourhood school. Admission, attendance and completion of education up to this age have to be ensured by the government concerned.
2. ‘Free education’ means that no child attending a government-supported school shall be liable to pay capitation fee (donation), charges or expenses that may prevent him or her from completing elementary education.
3. No child admitted in school shall be subjected to physical punishment or mental harassment, held back in class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education.
4. Private tuition by teachers is banned.
5. The Central and State governments shall have concurrent responsibility to provide funds for carrying out the provisions of this Act.
6. 25% reservation in private schools is allocated to provide free and compulsory education for children of disadvantaged groups and weaker sections including differently abled children randomly selected from the neighbourhood, none of whom would be interviewed prior to admission. The government would bear the cost of education for these children in a compensatory mechanism to the extent it spends per child in government owned schools.
7. School Management Committees will run the State-owned and aided schools to make parents and the community into stakeholders. The committee will consist of elected members of the Local Authority and parents, teachers; at least three-fourths of its members are to be the parents/guardians of children studying in the school. Proportionate representation is to be given to parents or guardians of children belonging to disadvantaged groups or weaker sections.
8. There is a provision for establishing a recognition authority in every State under which all the schools have to fulfill the minimum requirements of infrastructure within 3 years otherwise they would lose recognition. The National Commission for Elementary Education shall be constituted to monitor all aspects of elementary education including quality and to also ensure, for e.g., that the curriculum is in line with the Constitution.
The Right to Education Bill attempts a small step in the direction of a Common School System that was recommended by the Kothari Education Commission as far back as 1964. A common school system using the concept of neighbourhood schools can overcome disparities or inequities in education due to caste, class, creed, gender, language, region, or differing physical or mental abilities. The government has so far failed to get legislation passed to put a Common School System ensuring free and equal education in place. The current RTE Bill aims at universalizing and to some extent standardizing elementary education as its provisions apply to government, aided and private schools.
Some valid criticisms of this Bill can be summed up as follows: the Bill pays only lip service to the concepts of equality, social justice and democracy because it basically fails to do away with the dichotomy of public (private) and government-run schools without which there cannot be free and equal schooling. Private schools can continue to charge whatever fees it takes to provide ‘quality’ education, that is, education that fits children for careers at the top levels of a globalised economy. The division between the haves and have-nots—the underprivileged and the overprivileged, in other words the underfed and the overfed—continues in a caste and class bifurcated society. Double shifts in schools will be allowed; and there is no guarantee that fee-paying children would sit in the same class room together with free seat ones. There is ample scope for subversion in various ways of the 25% mandatory quota for children of disadvantaged sections in private schools.
The language of instruction is still not explicitly the mother tongue and/or the regional language for all. There is no clarity on how the costs of providing education will be divided up between the Centre and the States. There is no legal liability for the state actors for non-implementation of provisions under this Bill. As at present accountability on any level of the education system is not sufficiently provided for. The Bill with all its clauses, according to one commentator, makes “the institutionalization of inequity …complete and constitutional.” (Ravi Kumar: “Right to Education Bill”, Frontier, March 22-28, 2009, p. 15). Due to these flaws many civil rights groups and educationists are against the Bill in its present form and plan to file public interest litigation in the Supreme Court to stop its being finally enacted into a law.
The urgency to get such a Bill passed was apparent. UNESCO’s “Education for All – Global Monitoring Report 2007” ranked India 105th out of 127 nations on the Education for All development index. In 2004, India’s rank had been 99th out of 125 countries in the Education for All development indices, where the parameters considered were: performance in universal primary education, adult literacy, quality of education and gender equity. India’s performance on this front lags much behind East Asian countries and, of course, the advanced industrialized nations. With a general literacy rate of a little above 70% (73.47% according to the 2001 Census) India also has gross rural-urban and male-female disparities. Sixty-six per cent of out-of-school children are girls in India, and it is one among seventeen countries in the world where in primary education the survival for boys is higher than that for girls. According to this report, even in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal girls have better chances of surviving till the last grade of primary education.
Many international agencies have been expressing concern about the extent of illiteracy and lack of education in India and other poor countries of the world. They have also made financial commitments to augment the state’s resources on this front. The World Conference on Education for All, organized in 1990 at Jomtien in Thailand by the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP, 155 member states of the UN, and several donor agencies, adopted a declaration calling upon member states and international agencies to take effective steps towards achieving Education for All by the year 2000. In April 2000 representatives from about 160 countries gathered in Dakar, Senegal, for the World Education Forum. They affirmed their commitment to the cause of Education for All by 2015.
This focus and emphasis on universal elementary education comes from the role being assigned to India’s teeming millions in a globalised economy. India’s role—as envisaged by the global and Indian corporate sector—is that of a global service and manpower provider, a knowledge power and leading industrial nation.
A modern industrial nation in order to meet the requirements of the labour market requires a minimum of 80% literacy. It is to fulfill these objectives that funds are being provided by international agencies like the World Bank, International Development Agency, the Overseas Development Administration, Japanese Funds-in-Trust, West European governmental funding agencies and other donors for basic education projects like the DPEP (District Primary Education Programme), SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan) and other innovative and experimental educational programmes, particularly for deprived groups such as Adivasis and women.
The Indian government has also increased its outlay on Education in the current 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-2012). A 2% cess has been laid on taxpayers and the central gross budgetary support has been increased from less than 8% in the Xth Plan to over 19% in the XIth Plan. This does not necessarily mean an increase of outlay on elementary education as well as the budget 2009-10 shows. In terms of GDP, 5% up from 3.5% will be spent on education during this Plan period, although the desirable percentage is 6%.
While the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill seems to be a step forward on the universalisation of education front, its limitations are all too glaring. In addition to the negative features already mentioned, a major lacuna is the neglect of quality pre-school care of children below 6 years of age. This responsibility has been shirked by the government. The state still fails to fulfill its constitutional obligation to provide formal education that is free and equal to all children from early childhood up to at least class 10. The privatization profit-making trend has actually been given a fillip by the Bill in an underhand way. The government will continue to depend to a great extent upon private, non-governmental and voluntary agencies and on external debt finance to provide education to this age group.
We have seen many ‘good’ laws passed in India, but they have their loopholes that can easily be seized upon by the vested interests. The crux lies in the implementation. The on-paper gross enrolment ratio may or may not increase as a result of this Act and it does try to mitigate some of the gross evils of the present system affecting middle class parents, but the basic ills plaguing the education system are surely unlikely to be redressed through the Bill in its present form.