Write an article on Right to Education Art and suggest ways implement it.
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The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE Act), 2009 was notified on April 1, pursuant to the 86th Amendment to the Constitution (2002) which guarantees primary education as a fundamental right. The RTE Act and its notification are rightly hailed by many as a landmark in the history of education in post-independence India. But while these are momentous developments, they also highlight – even 60 years after the Constitution came into force – our conspicuous failure to fulfill the Directive Principle 45 of the Constitution (1950) which promised to provide free and compulsory education to all children within a period of ten years. Had the directive principle been implemented in letter and spirit, the need for the 86th Amendment and the RTE Act would not have arisen.
The plain reality of Indian education is that even after 60 years, there are major problems in terms of daunting numbers of out-of-school children, high dropout rates, poor infrastructure facilities, unmanageable pupil-teacher ratios, high degree of qualitative differentiation in the education received by various socio-economic strata of society, and above all, deplorably low learning outcomes of children.
These problems of Indian education are attributed to the vagueness and ambiguity in the directive principle, which did not define ‘free’ or even ‘education’. It was felt that the rulers of free India would be enlightened and hence there was no need for rigid and elaborate definitions. This has proved to be too high an expectation. During the past half century several governments have attempted to define free education, as formal, non-formal, informal and distance learning.
The government’s half-hearted attempts and consequent failures necessitated the Supreme Court’s intervention which in a 1992 Judgement declared that “the citizens of this country have a fundamental right to education; every child/citizen of this country has a right to free education until he completes the age of 14 years”. This Judgement obliged the then government to make the Constitutional Amendment which has been followed by the RTE Act. It is also important to note that the Supreme Court in its Judgement, regarded as one of the most enlightened judgments in judicial history, observed that the fundamental right to education flows from the right of the people to live like human beings with dignity. It is necessary to examine the RTE Act and its provisions against this backdrop, to determine whether they are in line with the letter and spirit of the Judgement and the Directive Principle 45 of the Constitution.
While the RTE Act defines ‘free’ education in a way much better than is the practice, the definition is still not comprehensive. Until recently, free education meant tuition fee-free education. Schools, both public and private, were allowed to and levied charges under other heads such as admission, development, laboratory and library fees. Now the RTE Act prohibits all types of fees, including capitation fees and other charges “which may prevent him or her from pursuing and completing the elementary education,” leaving the authorities to decide whether a particular fee/charge prevents a child from going to school or not. The Act should have simply and clearly banned all types of fees and payments to schools without any qualification, and also made it mandatory for them to provide all necessary learning materials such as textbooks and stationery, uniforms, and noon meal to every child. In a sense, interpretation of ‘free education’ has been left to the bureaucracy and officialdom.
Secondly, the act makes it obligatory upon government to provide free elementary education to every child – ensure compulsory admission, availability of neighbourhood schools, eliminate discrimination, and guarantee quality education. Since the Directive Principle could not direct the government sufficiently, the Act makes it compulsory for the government to act. No compulsion on parents to send children to schools is indicated in the Act, though the 86th Constitutional Amendment makes it a fundamental duty of every parent “to provide opportunities for education to his child.”
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