RTE Act: bedeviled details

Parliament recently passed the right to Education (RTE) Act which mandates free and compulsory education for all children aged six-14. For those of us who have been in the vanguard of this nearly two decades-long effort, passage of the Act is a historic vindication.

Since it has been passed by both houses of Parliament and while its rules are being formulated, I have closely examined the RTE Act and found there are several provisions which could complicate implementation of this admirable initiative of the Congress-led UPA-2 government. There are the usual issues of definition; plus, there are several grey areas which could subvert its intent. In the end, the goals of this laudable legislation could become obscured and the Act could degenerate into a tangle, providing rent-seeking opportunities to bureaucrats and politicians.

Thus in s.12, the Bill/Act mandates that all schools “shall admit in class I, to the extent of at least twenty-five percent of the strength of that class, children belonging to (the) weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighbourhood and provide free and compulsory elementary education till its completion”. The problem with this beneficent provision is who will define the “weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighbourhood?” This provision has the potential of transforming into a slippery scam.

The Act goes on to say that private schools “shall be reimbursed expenditure so incurred by it to the extent of per-child-expenditure incurred by the State, or the actual amount charged from the child, whichever is less”. According to most estimates, government spending per child is less than Rs.3,000 per annum or about Rs.250 per month. Against this, under the Central government’s NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), the minimum wage is Rs.100 per day for a minimum 100 days per year. There’s the rub: if the Central/state government can pay Rs.10,000 per year to help a rural labourer keep body and soul together, why is it so miserly when it comes to funding primary school children?

These are but two examples of how devils in the detail could sabotage this noble-minded legislation. There are other such minefields in the RTE Act that the small band of officials who are transcribing the Act into law ought to be aware of, and ensure that in its final form the Act closes all loopholes. Yes, it’s important to abide by the letter of the law, but it’s more important to uphold the spirit of the RTE Act. Indeed, some of the spirit behind the Act may already be vitiated. In framing the new law, the government has left itself open to the charge of bureaucratic fumbling.

In the government’s view, private schools come in several avatars: aided and unaided, recognised and unrecognised. The biggest chunk of students is enroled in “unreco-gnised” schools. These are essentially private schools based in urban slums and rural outposts, step-children of the government dominated education system. Low-cost, for-profit private ventures run by entrepreneurs, they are already catering to the “weaker sections” of urban slum dwellers and rural poor.

The notion that only government can provide education and other services for the poor is outdated, dating back to the imperial raj. It is a relic of the ‘white man’s burden’, a cousin of racism and imperialism. By making government recognition the touchstone of its education policy, and the RTE Act, lawmakers in India are unwittingly perpetuating the colonial tradition of imperial government and missionary charity. For all the names of cities and streets they change to demonstrate their anti-colonial credentials, India’s ruling elites are nevertheless inheritors of the white man’s burden.

Socialism, central planning, non-alignment are all part of the same burden. Today the economy is largely directed by the public interest and has been broadly privatised, while foreign policy is free from ideological blinkers. However, as the RTE Act demonstrates, the social sector is still not free. This is not a blanket call to privatise education but a plea that policymakers consider the ground reality: unrecognised schools are a fact of life, patronised by even the poorest households. Instead of trying to shackle them with unattainable requirements for recognition, the government needs to help them serve their students and communities better.

Indeed, government needs to create an environment in which all types of schools flourish. The challenge of universalising primary education needs all hands on deck: private and government schools for the affluent as well as for the “weaker sections”.  In its present form the RTE Act could prove fatal for unrecognised private schools which serve the poor. The group of officials charged with making rules and regulations based on the Act would do well to scrap the onerous criteria private schools must fulfill for government recognition, and tighten instead, vigilance over qualitative issues such as curricula and teacher training.

At a recent seminar, a senior official in the HRD ministry told the assembled audience that the RTE Act 2009 will do for the education sector what the reforms of 1991 did for the economy. It is certainly true that the RTE Act is broad and sweeping in scope and could indeed achieve that, but the devil is in the details.

(Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist)