DR JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN is the founder of the LokSatta movement and Foundation for Democratic Reforms.
He speaks to Shreyas Bharadwaj on how the Right to Education Act was conceived with entirely wrong assumptions and aims, and is harming children’s education, both in public and private schools, and the people being hurt the most are the poor. Excerpts:
Do you believe that the Right to Education (RTE) Act has been beneficial?
The evidence is very conclusive; it is not even a matter of opinion any longer. I would cite two important pieces of evidence.
The first is about enrolment. While overall enrolment has increased in the past 10-12 years, it is not because of RTE. It is because of a general improvement in enrolment in the country, general prosperity, movements led by NGOs and others, and most of all because of a marked increase in private school enrolment.
The primary aim of the RTE Act is to try and increase enrolment in government schools, right? It is all about standards in government schools, more money, more teachers, better teacher student ratio, better infrastructure and all those things. But what happened in the past 10 years, after the RTE Act has come into existence? The enrolment in government schools actually fell in absolute numbers by about 11 per cent. And this number is about two years old; today the number may be even worse. And the enrolment in private schools has gone up by 40 per cent. The fact is that after the RTE was enacted, there has been a flight of students from government schools to private schools. You don’t have to prove further, that after spending hundreds of thousands of crores, people have lost further faith in government schooling.
Secondly, be it government or private, the quality of education has deteriorated, or at least there is no evidence of any improvement whatsoever.
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