The Supreme Court in its verdict on the constitutionality of the Right to Education Act in relation to the reservation of seats for Economically Weaker Section [EWS] and socially disadvantaged [SD] children has rightly upheld the principle of integration. It is hard to see how it could have been any other way. In fact, the arguments against segregation and in favour of diversity in schools have long been settled in international debates on education. In India, where disparities are wide and reflected in the increasing gap between private and public schools, the need to make schools inclusive is perhaps even greater. This is not to deny that there will be challenges faced by all concerned — school managements, teachers, parents and children — in enforcing the law both in letter and in spirit. But given that children from the EWS and SD backgrounds are being inducted in the “incoming” class of a school, the anxiety being expressed seems somewhat exaggerated. It is another matter that it is being expressed almost exclusively by the “elite' sections of society. No EWS parent or child, for whom the “trauma” is likely to be greater, is complaining or wanting to do away with the quota.
Real issues
Nevertheless, the matter has now been settled by the Supreme Court. Legal clarity to the argument for diversity in the classroom and regulation of quality in all schools — public and private — has been provided. It is time this issue, which has taken up far more space than warranted, was laid to rest and focus shifted to the real issues plaguing the education sector.
For all the efforts of government programmes in the last decade, and especially through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan [SSA], basic education in this country is still a far cry from being universal or of satisfactory quality. It could even be argued that the RTE may not have been needed were this the case. There is a growing realisation that education, particularly but not exclusively, in the public sector has been on a downslide, and that nothing short of radical change was required to turn the tide. This is reflected in the provisions of the RTE Act. The Act establishes for the first time standards for not just infrastructure such as classrooms, toilets and drinking water, but also for quality by stipulating that teaching — teachers' education and training, their recruitment rules, their professionalisation, their accountability — be redesigned. It also addresses teaching methods, curriculum formation and evaluation procedures, as well as corporal punishment and discrimination, all of which are intrinsic to quality and all of which are in need of reform. But bringing about a “paradigm shift” of this type and scope is not easy, especially when the subject is concurrent, involving multiple levels of government.
But the task ahead is clear. Less than 20 per cent of children in this country go to some form of private school; the rest are either enrolled in a government school or not in any school at all. It is these children who need to be addressed and towards whom the RTE Act is largely directed. Quality education for close to 80 per cent of the children in this country still needs to be guaranteed within the framework of RTE. Herein lies the real challenge.
This challenge is made worse by the fact that even as the state has made elementary education a legally guaranteed right of every child, information on how many children are in fact “out-of-school” — not just “never-enrolled,” but not attending, dropped out or virtually dropped out — is not officially available. These are all children who have fallen out of the loop of mainstream education, but the system has no means of accounting for them. They include the urban homeless, the stigmatised, the migrant, but also the many, many children who, while enrolled, attend school at best sporadically. In an exercise conducted by the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (which is mandated to monitor the RTE), a house-to-house survey was conducted in 12 districts across the country to assess the situation of out-of-school children [OOSC]. The gap between the official figures of OOSC and what the NCPCR found was startlingly large. While the data are yet to be fully analysed, a preliminary look shows the gap to be as much as 40-50 per cent in some areas. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Identifying all the children, bringing them to school, providing adequate physical infrastructure and qualified teachers and then ensuring they attend regularly and learn all they are meant to learn in an atmosphere free of fear and trauma — all this is a very tall order. What it means is that many more resources and far greater efforts will be required, especially within the ambit of the RTE Act.
It also means that the institutional structures of the state will need to be geared towards meeting these goals. Within the education sector itself, the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) — the body responsible for overseeing teacher education — will need to be overhauled; teacher training institutes — the District Institutes of Education and Training — will need to be reformed; the Block Education Office — the administrative unit closest to the people — will need to be revitalised. The NCPCR and SCPCRs, mandated to monitor RTE, will need resources, structures and staff. At the current allocation of Rs. 50 per school/year and no sanctioned posts, it is hard to see how the huge task of monitoring across the country can be optimally achieved.
Role of PRIs
The Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), which have been given the important role of grievance redress, are yet to wake up to this huge responsibility. No rules have been framed and no resources allocated to the PRIs to undertake any form of grievance redress. In other words, the understanding that elementary education is now to be enforced as a fundamental right and not implemented as yet another scheme is still to be given institutional shape and form. For this, the Education Departments and the Panchayati Raj Departments will need to develop a framework for how grievances related to RTE will be addressed.
None of this is to say that nothing has been done so far. Many important steps have been taken to set the ball rolling. Rules have been notified in all but two States; government orders have been passed for the formation of School Management Committees; guidelines for prohibiting corporal punishment have been issued; a Teacher Education Test to select teachers has been instituted; budgetary allocations have been increased, even a grievance redress “advisory” (albeit a rudimentary one) has been issued. But much more needs to be done if the challenges are to be addressed in real earnest. Also, the pace of implementation needs to be accelerated before people start to lose faith in the enforcement of this fundamental right.
The RTE Act provides a strong legal framework for addressing most of the challenges that confront the elementary education sector, but unless it is backed by political will and commitment translated into institutional capacities with adequate resources, it will remain a wasted opportunity.
(Kiran Bhatty is former National Coordinator [RTE], National Council for the Protection of Child Rights.)
