Question

What are the issues of right to education faced by the schools and suggestion for better implementation

Answer 1

Education has an immense impact on the human society. One can safely assume that a person is not in the proper sense till he is educated. It trains the human mind to think and take the right decision.


An uneducated person cannot read and write and hence he is closed to all the knowledge and wisdom he can gain through books and other mediums.

Education opens doors of brilliant career opportunities. It fetches better prospects in career and growth. It is a preparation for living in a better way in future with an ability to participate successfully in the modern economy and society.


The core of the right to education relates to its substance, which differs from education itself. Effective and transformative education should be the result of the exercise of the right to education, which is a universal human right. The right is about the entitlement to claim the substance of it; it relates to the possibility of demanding the right to education and making it justifiable.




Litigation and RTE


While studying cases in the High Courts and the Supreme Court from 2010 to 2015 which directly affected rights of a child under the RTE Act by a research centre, it was observed that some provisions of the Act are more litigated than the others.More litigated issues


As much as 49% cases on the RTE Act have dealt with questions of access to education.The reasons for this may be denial of admission, fixing age-limits for admission to a particular class, transfer of students from one school to another, and conducting screening tests at the time of admission.Thus, they feature prominently in the priorities of litigants.Further, out of the total disputes settled, almost 24% exclusively refer to Section 12(1)(c) of the Act, which mandates all non-minority, unaided private schools to reserve 25% seats for children belonging to economically weaker sections and disadvantaged groups.The
others are yet to be enforced by schools



They account merely 5% of the total litigation.The provisions mandating basic facilities and adequate infrastructure in schools constitute 11% of the total disputes settled under the RTE Act.It has been observed that fewer litigants seem to have approached courts for relief over infrastructural norms and availability of qualified teachers as required under the RTE Act. However it does not mean that these norms are better implemented than more litigated ones.These provisions impose positive obligations on States for implementing the RTE Act and, therefore, must be progressively realised as it may not be high priority for litigants who are generally individual parents.The provisions on banning corporal punishment and prescription of pupil-teacher ratio in classrooms have not been contested at all, even though circumstantial evidence and news reports suggest clear violations of these.Limitations of judiciary


From the above types and frequency of litigations, it appears that the RTE Act remains under-enforced.The courts are usually demand-driven and give priority to issues that are brought forward by litigants. Hence, they still don’t have the opportunity to go beyond injunctions and focus on long-term reliefs involving systemic reform.In very few cases, the courts have formulated monitoring mechanisms to ensure timely implementation of their orders.However in some cases the court’s interventions were instrumental in the implementation of the Act. For instance, courts directed the Gujarat and Telangana governments to implement key provisions of the Act, including section 12(1)(c). This happened as late as in 2015.Proposed reforms


 Right to Education ActIt’s been eight years since the Right to Education Act, 2009, came into force.The RTE Act has been touted to be a landmark legislation that seeks to realise the fundamental right to education for all children in the age group of 6-14 years.Yet it is being perceived as an ill-drafted and poorly implemented legislation.Many schools in country still suffer from lack of adequate drinking water facilities, playgrounds or the necessary infrastructure prescribed by the Act.There still exists cases of corporal punishment which has been banned by RTE.The learning outcomes which are the indicators of quality of classroom instruction have been found to be badly low.Thus, it shows that bureaucratic apathy and weak institutional mechanisms are some factors that have contributed to poor and less significant implementation of the Act.


However, there is relatively unexamined indicator of how the law has worked is its contestation in courts.