Making Right to education work in India

Free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years was one of the Directive Principles of State Policy intended to be implemented within 10 years of the commencement of the Indian Constitution. Not being justiciable, this directive failed to prod the Indian state into any kind of concrete action. Large sections of two generations grew up, in independent India, with little or no formal education.

After 60 years, with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, the entitlement to education has become enforceable. Although it took a long time coming, the Act is noteworthy on several counts.

It offers a framework for ensuring quality education, for creating infrastructure, for making available a sufficient number of trained teachers, and for extending government funding to private schools. The central and State governments are to share the financial burden for implementing the Act in the ratio of 55:45, and the Finance Commission has given Rs.25,000 crore to the States. An outlay of Rs.15,000 crore was approved for 2010-11 by the central government, but if the Act is to achieve its stated objectives of ensuring a fixed student-teacher ratio, neighbourhood schools of specified quality for every child, and training for teachers to a national norm, the funding seems grossly inadequate.

The National University for Educational Planning and Administration calculates that implementation of the Act will cost Rs. 171,000 crore for five years. It will be a great shame if the governments of rising India fail to come up with what it takes to educate all children decently at the foundational level.

But it won't be enough to approach free and compulsory education up to the age of 14 as an entitlement, especially for the millions of children who are left out in the cold. Accessing this right meaningfully and in full measure will require, aside from the investment of huge resources, financial and human, a lot of work to be done on the ground.

Key to this is seeing free and compulsory education for children not just as a right — but as a duty. It is the duty of the state, parents and guardians, and the community to ensure that all children of school-going age are in school.

A substantial proportion of India's poor children are engaged in agricultural labour or petty trades, housework, and sibling care. Ending the morally and socially abhorrent practice of child labour, not ‘regulating' it, must be taken up as a non-negotiable objective.

But history teaches us that child labour will not go away, and free and compulsory education will remain a half-empty and formal right, if we do not hold governments to strict account for failing to perform their duty by the children of India.(hindu)