The Horror Called RTE

 

- Seetha And Antara Sengupta

I WANT EVERY Indian child, girl and boy, to be so touched by the light of education. I want every Indian to dream of a better future and live that dream.” Those were the words of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his address to the nation on 1 April 2010, the day the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act became operational.

Seven years later, there is widespread acknowledgement that the Right to Education (RTE) Act (as it is popularly known), far from helping realise a dream, is actually a nightmare. A law that was supposed to be the solution to all of India’s problems in primary education has now itself become the problem. Far from increasing access of children from low-income backgrounds to education, it has imperilled it; far from improving the quality of education, it has led to deterioration in standards. And as if this were not enough, it has opened up more avenues for corruption.

Staunch defenders of the Act, though their numbers are dwindling, insist that the Act is not the problem; poor implementation is. The sceptics, whose ranks are swelling, concede that the RTE Act may have helped in a couple of areas, but point out that they stand vindicated in their initial assessment—that it is a fundamentally and conceptually flawed piece of legislation. It has focussed on infrastructure and inputs—teacher-pupil ratio, teacher qualifications and salaries, uniforms—rather than quality of education. At a time when the licence-quota raj in education needed to be dismantled and the market allowed to grow to meet rising demand, its provisions are designed to reinforce the licence raj and kill the market.