10 October 2008

10 October 2008
Learning curve
The Right to Education Bill may soon be in Parliament. The question is will it erase the inequalities in the present system and provide uniform, quality education to all children, asks MANAS JOARDAR

A group of ministers has asked Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Arjun Singh to make some changes to the Right to Education (RTE) Bill ~ it will most likely be introduced in the coming session of Parliament in its revised form. A happy ending may be on the cards.
The Constitution was amended in 2002, during the NDA regime, to effect such an outcome. Though not perfect, the amendment sought to make free and compulsory education to all children between the ages of six to 14 a fundamental right. Follow-up legislation was necessary. It is around this new legislation ~ embodied in various versions of the RTE Bill ~ that the debate has been going on interminably since then.
Assuming power in 2004, the UPA government prepared the draft RTE Bill 2005, after making changes to earlier versions prepared by the NDA government. This too, having faced allegations of being riddled by loopholes, was referred to a high-level group comprising the finance minister, Planning Commission deputy chairman, the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council chairman and the HRD minister. After an elaborate exercise, the group prepared the model RTE Bill 2006, and passed the buck of enacting it to state governments, apprehending increased litigation and lack of resources. Most states refused to buy the idea. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) ~ a brainchild of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ~ also advised that the RTE Bill be enacted immediately, with the Centre bearing the lion’s share of financial responsibility. Provisions for justiciability against non-performance was also stressed by the NKC.
The central government started afresh. One more bill ~ the RTE Bill, 2008 ~ was prepared and referred to Cabinet before being tabled, according to the time frame then conceived, during the monsoon session of Parliament. That didn’t happen.
Among its major shortcomings, the latest draft Bill provides only a lukewarm commitment towards care of children below six years of age. Making the number of teachers of a school dependent solely on the total count of students ~ as prescribed in the schedule ~ is also a faulty proposition. A school that has a total of 60 students studying in classes I through V, is to be run by two teachers only. Teaching will surely suffer. Even if vacancies and exceedingly high rate of absenteeism are taken care of, there should be a minimum of one teacher per class.
Private tuition for ‘economic gain’ has been prohibited for primary teachers. Can they be allowed to engage themselves in other activities for gain as delineated in the Ashok Mitra Commission Report? The Mitra commission suggested that primary school teachers should not be allowed to “engage in any other occupation, profession or economic activity”. A teacher’s job should, at the same time, be made more financially attractive and the selection process more transparent.
Infrastructure in government-run schools is abysmally poor. So is the quality of education. An overwhelming section of the middle class ~ known to care much for their wards’ education ~ whose involvement could have made a telling influence to improve the situation has, for a number of reasons, turned its back on the government-run education system. Privately managed elementary schools ~ 11.70 per cent in 2002-03 and 16.68 per cent in 2005-06 ~ are increasing at a fast clip.
Provisions for school management committees have been made for state and state-aided schools, but not for unaided private schools, many of which also provide substandard education charging exorbitant tuition fees, and are staffed by ill-paid and under-qualified teachers.
Section 6 of the draft Bill, while describing the responsibility of the state, seeks, inter alia, to “ensure the availability of a neighbourhood school for providing free and compulsory education for every child within a period of three years from commencement of this Act”.
As a matter of fact, the Kothari Commission report (1964-66) had observed: “The children of masses are compelled to receive sub-standard education...while the economically privileged parents are able to ‘buy’ good education for their children...By segregating their children, such privileged parents prevent them from sharing the life and experience of the children of the poor and coming into contact with the realities of life.”
It also said: “There is thus segregation in education itself ~ the minority of private, fee-charging, better schools meeting the needs of the upper class and the vast bulk of free, publicly maintained, but poor schools being utilized by the rest. What is worse, this segregation is increasing and tending to widen the gulf between the classes and the masses.”
What the commission recommended as a preventive measure was the creation of a common school system of public education “which will cover all parts of the country and all stages of school education and strive to provide equality of access to all children”. The neighbourhood school plan was suggested for this purpose. To explain its stand it explained itself: “The neighbourhood school concept implies that each school should be attended by all children in the neighbourhood irrespective of caste, creed, community, religion, economic condition or social status, so that there would be no segregation in schools.”
The education policy of 1986 also declared that “effective measures would be taken in the direction of the common school system recommended in the 1968 policy. The commitment was reiterated in the 1992 policy declaration. But the system does not stick to a rigidly uniform pattern, nor does it exclude private schools from its ambit. The common school system has been in existence over the years in most advanced countries including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the Nordic countries.
Lack of resources is no excuse. Since the Kothari commission report, successive governments at the Centre have expressed their desire to spend 6 per cent of GDP on education.
When it came to power, the UPA government also pledged, in its common minimum programme, “to raise public spending in education to at least 6 per cent of the GDP with at least half this amount being spent on primary and secondary schools”.
What is needed most is strong political will to make universal education a reality.

(The writer is a freelance
contributor)