Monday, November 21, 2011

RTE in Tamil Nadu – Well crossed, but not


        After a lot of pressures and tussles, the Tamil Nadu Government has notified the rules to implement the Right to Education Act, 2009.

        Though the Constitution makers wanted the Right to Education to be made a Fundamental Right within 10 years of adoption of the Constitution and they initially put it under the directive principles, it remained there until the Supreme Court broke the ice in the case of Unnikrishnan, J.P., Vs. State of AP and others by stating as below far back in the year 1993:
“We cannot believe that any State would say that it need not provide education to its people even within the limits of its economic capacity and development. It goes without saying that the limits of economic capacity are, ordinarily speaking, matters within the subjective satisfaction of the State…
We have held the right to education to be implicit in the right to life because of its inherent fundamental importance.”
Nine years later, the Government of India responded to this declaration by inserting, through the Ninety-third amendment to the Constitution, Article 21-A, which reads as below:
“The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine”

        It was only after another 7 years that the Right to Education Act itself became a law.  However, even this law has a major lacuna.  It sought to enable compulsory and free education only for 25% of the children of age group 6 – 14 years.  Thus the well, constituting the remaining 75%, remains to be crossed. 
The argument that the Constitution itself provided for such a piece-meal-legislation by putting the blame on ‘in such manner as the State may, by law, determine’, would be grossly forgetting that the Article states in no uncompromising terms that ‘all children of the age of six to fourteen years’ should be provided with free and compulsory education.
        The present initiative of the Government of Tamil Nadu to implement this Act of 2009 –even the 25% of the fundamental right - is thus a long due one. 
Yet there is a hue and cry from the managements of the private schools.  Their earlier objection to the entire idea was on grounds that the fees for these children would become a burden, either to the institution or for the other parents.  Now that the Government has announced in the recent rules that the fees for these children would be borne by the Government itself, the private managements content that there would be a delay in payment by the Government.  They also say that they will not be able to collect admission fees (read as donations) from these Government sponsored kids.  They are aggrieved that there is no method of selection envisaged in the rules.  They also ask half-in-public-and-half-in-private, ‘why the government could not send these 25% kids also to the government schools’. 
        Taking their objections one by one, the matter regarding delay in payment of fees is absurd.  From the remaining 75% children they are going to collect the fees much ahead and therefore they can always reserve the amount to be received from the Government for the expenses pertaining to the last months of the academic year.
     Regarding the method of selection, if they have doubts, it remains to be answered by these schools as to how they have been doing it all along, even after the highest court of the land has stipulated on these issues.
     They should also remember that donations for admission have also been banned by the Supreme Court.  They cannot say that these donations are material to the salary of the teaching and non-teaching staff since the fees determined legislation as per the fee regulation Act is after taking into consideration the expenditure of the schools.
      Before parting, it is to be emphasized that the tendency of the private schools to say that the government sponsored kids could be sent to Government schools and that private school managements are not accountable to the parents who are stake holders in the schools and are financing their activities, smacks of a feudalistic mind set.