Six years ago, the 86th amendment was passed by Parliament , making education a fundamental right for children in the 6 to 14 age group. And three years after the first draft of a Bill was prepared by the drafting committee, we finally have a Bill that has been cleared by the cabinet for introduction in Parliament. The pressing question is will it be passed before the term of the present Parliament is over, or must it lapse? But the deeper question is why such an essential aspect of nation-building has been constantly sidetracked?
Article 45 of the Directive Principles in the Indian Constitution recommends that the state must universalise elementary education within ten years by 1960. Successive governments simply ignored this duty, citing the lack of resources. The failure of the state did make the Indian Supreme Court intervene in 1993 through the famous Unnikrishnan judgment. The Supreme Court ruled that article 45 of the Directive Principles taken together with the right to life (article 21) already provide for the right to education to children upto 14 years. But this too was ignored till the 86th amendment was passed in 2002; which continues to remain unimplemented. This is proof enough that successive governments have not been terribly bothered if half of Indias children do not complete eight years of mandatory education of good quality.
It isnt as if the final Bill is so stringent that it would be impossible to implement. The age of the child has already been restricted to between 6 and 14, ignoring the critical age group 0 to 6, and from 14 to 18 18 being the upper limit in the definition of child in the UN Child Rights Convention to which India is a signatory. That is a huge exclusion, and hence, reduces costs significantly. The common school concept of education of equitable quality is also inadequately formulated in the Bill, since consensus was lacking in this crucial area. The rights of disabled, migrant and working children could likewise have been protected better than what the final version provides. A regulatory mechanism for private schools is absent in the Bill because of a lack of consensus.
What the Bill however does envisage are some minimum and critical provisions in the areas of access, equality and quality often called the elusive triangle of Indian education. It binds governments to provide a neighbourhood school to every child, within three years after being notified. It defines the minimum infrastructure rooms, toilets, libraries, playground etc. that each school must have, as also the minimum pupil teacher ratio to be maintained for each school. It defines a minimum quality of teachers, a modicum of social integration by allowing disadvantaged children to be admitted to good schools; restricted however to 25 per cent. It disallows anxiety in children through mindless testing, admission procedures, physical punishment, capitation fees and paid tuitions. It clearly states that no child can be denied admission due to the lack of paper work birth certificates or transfer certificates. The national and state commissions for the Protection of Child Rights are designated as authorities, in addition to local governments, to entertain complaints since they are already vested with civil judicial powers.
As for finances, estimates suggest the implementation would require around Rs. 12,000 crores per year not an astronomical figure, considering the UPA had, in its Common Minimum Program, promised to raise the educational expenditure to 6 per cent of GDP. Expenditure at the end of its term is only half the promised amount. These ought to be reasons enough for the Government and Parliament to end their terms by framing a law that has eluded the country for sixty-one years; they would be ill advised to let the Bill lapse at this final stage.
The writer, an educationist, was a member of the committee that drafted the 2005 Bill, and a member of the Working Group for the 2008 draft…