Home

Follow Countercurrents on Twitter 

Support Us

Popularise CC

Join News Letter

CC Videos

Editor's Picks

Press Releases

Action Alert

Feed Burner

Read CC In Your
Own Language

Bradley Manning

India Burning

Mumbai Terror

Financial Crisis

Iraq

AfPak War

Peak Oil

Globalisation

Localism

Alternative Energy

Climate Change

US Imperialism

US Elections

Palestine

Latin America

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Book Review

Gujarat Pogrom

Kandhamal Violence

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

About CC

Disclaimer

Fair Use Notice

Contact Us

Search Our Archive

 



Our Site

Web

Subscribe To Our
News Letter

Name: E-mail:

 

Printer Friendly Version

Supreme Court Judgement On Right To Education : Much Ado For Nothing

By Anand Teltumbde

13 May, 2012
Countercurrents.org

The entire media was gaga over the Supreme Court’s majority judgement on 12 April 2012 on a bunch of petitions filed by private unaided institutions upholding the constitutional validity of the Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009, which mandates 25 percent free seats to the poor in government and private unaided schools uniformly across the country. There were euphoric statements that it would clear the way for poor students to get ‘quality education’ in the elite schools. Notwithstanding a myriad problems associated with its implementation, none thought it worthwhile to raise certain obvious questions such as what happens to the balance 75 percent students’ right to receive quality education; what happens to government schools and the role of government as such. The RTE Act well exemplifies how the governments, irrespective of their ideological orientation, indulge into tricking people and how our intellectuals, barring a respectable exception of few, capitulate with this trickery with their silence.

Trickery of the RTE

The RTE Act itself was brought in with much jubilation to hide the massive failure of governments in keeping the constitutional promise and to cover up intrigues in negating that promise. The fact remains that the right to education was already enshrined in the Article 45 in Part IV of the Constitution as a Directive Principle of the State Policy. Much against the wishes of Babasaheb Ambedkar the Constituent Assembly had denied it a place in the Part III as a fundamental right. However, except for its lack of justiciability, this was the only Article among Directive Principles that had a specific time frame of ten years for its fulfillment from the commencement of the Constitution. The successive governments have been guilty of failure to meet this promise to the people. They were woken up in 1993 by a Supreme Court judgment in the case of Unnikrishnan versus State of Andhra Pradesh. In this almost revolutionary interpretation of the Constitution, the Supreme Court stated that Article 45 in Part IV of the Constitution must be read in “harmonious construction” with Article 21 (Right to Life) in Part III since Right to Life is meaningless if it is without access to knowledge. Thus the Supreme Court in 1993 accorded the status of Fundamental Right to “free and compulsory education” of all children up to 14 years of age (including children below six years of age).

The delivery of this verdict forced the then Congress government to figure out the ways and means of realizing it. The Saikia Committee was formed and in 1997 recommended an amendment of the Constitution making education for children under 14 a fundamental right. Finally, in December 2002, the 86th Amendment to the constitution was passed under the BJP led NDA government inserting a new article 21A that summarily took away the right to education of 17 crore children up to the age of six and made the new Article 45 to take care of their early childhood care and education. Interestingly, it made the right of the rest contingent upon the decision of the state, opening up a whole pandora’s box of possible dilution and manipulation. It stated “the State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of 6 to 14 years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.” It took another eight years after the 86th amendment and 17 years from the trigger of the Unnikrishnanan judgment before the RTE Act was passed. It was no right; it was rather snatching away of the existing right given in the constitution! It just gave the government an opportunity to legitimize rampant commercialization of the education that it had promoted during the previous two decades of its so called economic reforms.

Scope of the Judgment

The constitution had envisaged common school system in consonance with the principles of equality and social justice enshrined as Fundamental Rights. Any programme that provided education of varying quality to different sections of society and denied education of equitable quality is unacceptable to the Constitution. But precisely that happened all the while. The schools ranged from those with no roof, no teacher in villages to the expensive boarding schools and international schools for the handful elites. The RTE legitimated this trend as neo-casteism in the sphere of education. According to the latest DISE (District Information System for Education) statistics for 2010-11 (provisional), 78.41 percent of all schools are government schools with 67.15 percent share in total enrolment, making the government the major provider of education. Of the 21.49 percent private schools, the 14.04 percent private unaided schools with estimated enrolment share of 20 percent are the real subject matter of the judgment. A large portion of these unaided schools fall under the minority category, and therefore have been excluded from the application of RTE as per Article 29 and Article 30 of the Constitution. The coverage of the judgment thus reduces to less than 10 percent of gross enrolment. If we compute full implementation of 25 percent quota they could thus cater to less than 2.5 percent. What about the balance 97.5 percent?

All said and done, this scheme of admitting 25 percent students from economically weaker sections (EWS) is going to be symbolic. While the judgment received euphoric welcome from all, none spoke about the obvious obstacles in its implementation. The prime issue is who is to bear the cost. The RTE Act stipulates that schools providing free and compulsory elementary education shall be reimbursed the expenditure to the extent of per-child-expenditure incurred by the state concerned, or the actuals charged for a student, whichever is less. Obviously, this would be peanuts in comparison to what these schools cost to their students. HRD minister Kapil Sibal confirmed that government’s contribution towards reimbursement will vary from Rs 6,000 to Rs 19,000 annually (Rs 500 to Rs 1,583.33 per month). Many of these schools (the real referent group) are internationally benchmarked in terms of their teacher-student ratio, infrastructure, technology intensity and consequently fees. An average fee for a regular school ranges from Rs 70,000 to Rs 100,000, whereas for an international school it could be Rs 5 to 7 lakhs. They generally distinguish them by the extra-curricular activities which invariably add to the formal costs. Many of these International Schools take their students on a trip abroad as a part of the school curriculum.

This symbolic gesture will surely come handy for these schools to increase their fee structure. Already the class that is their clientele has expressed apprehension against this move. Kapil Sibal alleviating their fears suggested them to mobilize corporate support under the CSR schemes, another neoliberal contrivance. They will certainly exploit all these irrespective of whether EWS students go there or not. The important issue is whether real EWS students will go to the real quality institutions the judgment envisages!

Regulation and Reservation

It is an open secret that the policy focus of the Indian government is on throwing open Indian education as one of the most lucrative markets for global investment as per the World Trade Organisation-General Agreement on Trade in Services (WTO-GATS) agenda. Indian education market is generally regarded as the only market which is price inelastic. Education is perceived by Indians as the only resource which can promise reasonable standard of living and better prospects for their children. India’s education sector currently offers an estimated US $40 billion market, with a potential 16 percent five-year CAGR of which approximately 50 percent is due to the school segment. The RTE Act well illustrates how the government could transform the crisis created by the Supreme Court into an opportunity to drive its neoliberal agenda. Right to education as an integral part of the right to life, read in conjunction with other articles of the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court, implies that all children get same quality of education through a common school system. But the governments skillfully dodged this essence and escaped from their obligations by adopting a neoliberal solution. They brought in all kinds of neoliberal taxonomy such as the PPP (Public Private Partnership), voucher system, refinanced loans and tax exemptions to both the investors (corporate houses, non-governmental organisations and religious bodies) and the consumers (children and parents), NGOs and so on in the sphere of education.

To assuage apprehensions about unbridled profiteering by private entrepreneurs in free market, the neoliberal framework has an instrument of regulation to take care of market imperfections and infirmities. Free the economic sector for the private capital and install a regulator is the institutional solution of the neoliberals. We have more than three dozens of such regulators already in place for the freed sectors such as electricity, petroleum, telecom, financial markets, and banking. Fundamentally, by assigning an administrative figure with the responsibility of overseeing interests of people, essentially a political space is effectively depoliticized. He is supposed to prescribe rules of the game and ref the play. They are proposing to install such a regulator also for education market freed for private capital.

Another patented instrument wielded by the Indian government excellently supplements the neoliberal stratagem. It is reservations. Systematically embellishing it with attributes of social justice, the governments use it as potent weapon in situations of socio-economic crises. Reservations have gained such an aura that their very mention preempts opposition and lends them easy passage. The RTE Act as it was conceived legitimizing multi-layered school system and promoting commercialization of education, was bound to be seen as elitist by multitude of masses. While this was happening as natural process the RTE context forced the government to take a stand. In order to assuage the consequent apprehensions it came out with the solution of 25 percent reservation for the EWS students. Insofar as this policy earned the praise from the intellectuals and general public, it has already proved successful, notwithstanding the objective facts.

Given the issue, the Supreme Court judgment may be commendable. But the issue is much bigger than mere applicability of 25 percent reservation. If the government is really sincere, it must spare at least education from its neoliberal obsession and launch a common school system for all across the country up to the age of 18 years apace with the changed times.

(The edited version of this article is published in EPW)

Dr Anand Teltumbde is writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with CPDR, Mumbai. [email protected]




 


Due to a recent spate of abusive, racist and xenophobic comments we are forced to revise our comment policy and has put all comments on moderation que.