'Educating Sita' no easy feat in India
By Santwana Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI - Sita does not go to school. This pithy, axiomatic sentence -
perhaps born out of someone's smart idea that the British title Educating Rita
could be profitably nativized - is a common refrain in India, often resorted to
by experts who throw dismal statistics at the self-obsessed chattering classes
in India as a shock tactic.
Well, despite their sustained exertions, it has taken India's executive and
chief legislature six decades of independence to make free education for
school-going children the law. The ball, first set rolling by a Supreme Court
ruling that elementary education must be made a fundamental right, took 16
years to reach the goal.
After parliament passed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education
bill, parents across the country, whether
rustic or urbane, poor or wealthy, backward or forward, will have to send Sita
and her brother - basically, all children between the ages six and 14 - to
school without fail. Otherwise, it would be treated as a violation of law. (Of
course, Sita will first have to be born, crossing the primary hurdle of female
foeticide, before making her way to school. But that's another long story.)
Needless to say, it is not merely parental reluctance - which, where it does
exist, stems from the need to have extra pairs of hand at work - that keeps
poor children away from school. Scores of people are theoretically poised on
the verge of flouting the law only because there may be nothing that can fall
within an acceptable definition of a school within miles of their habitat. It
is a common enough deprivation in India.
Hence the state, too, has its role demarcated. The bill places the onus of
providing certifiable infrastructure to support free education squarely on the
state's shoulders. As for the school itself, whether privately run or
government-funded/sponsored, the bill mandates that it will have to reserve 25%
of its seats for students from the economically backward sections of the
population at scholarship rates.
This has created a little storm in the teacup, with one section of the
education sector shouting from the rooftops that there would be the inevitable
problems of integration (between the rich and poor kids bundled together) and
this by itself carries the potential for social tension. Others blame the
government for having first come up woefully short in universalizing access to
quality education infrastructure and then passing the burden of free education
onto the private sector.
The unsaid part is a basic resentment at having the limited supply of seats in
quality private schools - seen, quite simply, as among the sort of goodies you
can buy with money, a class privilege - hived off to fill "welfare" quotas.
When caste-based reservations in higher education created mass wrath among the
more privileged castes two decades ago (and ever since), the argument always
was that caste was an invalid category in a modern society - and only an
economic criterion of deprivation would be acceptable. Now that one such comes
along, naturally the logical warfare must move to a different trench.
But at the lawmaker's end, the biggest debate is about finances. The states and
Delhi are yet to thrash out how exactly they will share the burden. The
disquiet is understandable because the estimated cost of implementing the
compulsory free education bill is said to be almost US$11.5 billion a year.
The Planning Commission had earlier expressed its inability to fork out that
kind of money. Convinced that state governments may not have the wherewithal to
implement the bill, economists and education evangelists are criticizing Delhi
for putting out a blank check with nobody's signature on it.
The ruling Congress party, however, has its own political compulsions. It had
promised compulsory free education to voters in its election manifesto. This
bill sits well with the socialistic, "we-are-for-the-common-man" image being
cultivated by the party, and has been rolled out in a hurry in keeping with the
pacey mode of government suggested by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 100-day
work schedule. Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal is thrilled to
have been able to keep to the schedule. Law Minister Veerappa Moily had had to
withdraw his bill on judicial reform at the introduction stage. The Right to
Education bill had no such hiccups as it was supported by parties across the
political spectrum.
The nagging doubts about its economic feasibility are not going to go away too
soon, though. It was, in fact, by citing the "impossible" financial burden of
such an enterprise that Mahatma Gandhi's dogged demand for making free school
education a fundamental right was averted by the post-independence government.
Even now, there is a lack of clarity on who will foot the bill, on whether the
state will come forward.
This owes to the federal structure of education in India. Education is on the
concurrent list and any sweeping, pan-India law on this front has to have the
states totally on board for it to have any meaning. In many ways, India follows
a federal structure of administration.
Sources in the Human Resource Development Ministry say in case the states
refuse to share the burden, throwing up their hands in the name of fund
shortages, the newly passed bill will be referred to the Finance Commission,
which then will sort out the funding issue. If the states happen to show a
positive mindset, the central government will replicate the pattern it follows
for the present school enrollment scheme - the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education
for All). It operates on a 70:30 ratio with Delhi picking up the hefty part of
the bill.
"We as a nation cannot afford our children not going to schools," Sibal says,
by way of trying to introduce a moral obligation to propel Delhi and the states
in their task of providing free and compulsory education to children. Though he
was initially accused of going too fast, his approach has rested on the
persuasive appeal of structural-reformist elements. For instance, this bill
also aims to stop the scourge of private tuition facilities, which are
sustained by the highly competitive school board exams.
Funds are not the only issue. A day before the Upper House of parliament passed
the bill, disability groups were up in arms, alleging that the draft
deliberately excluded disabled children from its ambit. This, in effect, would
mean that 30 million disabled children have no formal right to education.
Activists accused minister Kapil Sibal of engineering a u-turn from the United
Progressive Alliance government's earlier policy on education for the disabled.
They pointed out that Sibal's predecessor, Arjun Singh, had made a promise on
the floor of the House, during the 14th Lok Sabha (the Lower House's previous
term), that education would be universal across all groups.
Activists also accused Sibal of not being aware of the commitment made in the
11th five-year plan document. They even claimed that a specific clause that
took care of the needs and rights of disabled children just disappeared from
the bill after Sibal took over. Finally, the prime minister had to come out to
mollify the aggrieved group with a special instruction to his human resources
minister.
Despite these fundamental shortcomings, and whatever other teething trouble it
is bound to encounter in a country as large as India, the bill does represent a
historic and decisive turn from the past.
It promises to bring the light of education into the lives of millions of young
boys and girls forced into laboring in small-scale hazardous industries,
farmlands, households, hotels and the like to earn a living. Or, maybe merely
crisscrossing the map with their migrant labor parents until they, too, get
sucked up into the system.
Santwana Bhattacharya is a New Delhi-based journalist who writes on
politics, parliament and elections. She is currently working on a book on
electoral reforms and the emergence of regional parties in India.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
