RTE Act must be amended urgently

Edit- Indian Express-24 Sept

Take Rajasthan’s cue

More than four years after it came into effect, the egalitarian promise of the Right to Education Act remains significantly unmet. An unprecedented expansion in primary school education over the past decade, fuelled largely by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, has seen enrolment jump to nearly 100 per cent. Yet, each year, independent evaluations of learning levels of school-going children find persisting absences and lags and, in fact, scores have shown a sharp decline since 2009, the year the RTE was passed. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for 2013 found that 78 per cent of children in Class III and 53 per cent of children in Class V cannot read a Class II-level text. In arithmetic, only one in four coming out of Class V could solve division problems that are typically part of Class III or IV curricula. Earlier, the two Indian states participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) in 2011 had ranked near the bottom.

A debate is clearly needed on the provisions and implementation of the right to education. The Rajasthan government’s proposed amendments to the act must be seen in that context. According to a report in this paper, one of the changes that is being considered is reducing the emphasis placed on infrastructure requirements in schools. While setting a baseline for an enabling environment for learning is a worthy goal, the lopsided focus on expanding inputs has come at the cost of outcomes. The RTE’s preoccupation with building toilets, playgrounds and classrooms, fixing pupil-teacher ratios and the like has also had the unintended effect of thousands of budget schools shutting down due to inability to fulfil these criteria. Other proposals include re-introducing testing in certain classes to better assess a child’s learning level and launching a school voucher system to allow parents to choose where to send their children. Of course, the efficacy of these changes in improving the quality of learning is also open to debate. Hopefully, the Rajasthan government’s initiative will spark a wider discussion.

Rajasthan’s attempt to revisit the RTE is yet another instance of reform originating in the states rather than at the Centre. Earlier this year, it was Rajasthan, again, that unveiled labour law reforms. On Monday, the Madhya Pradesh government took its cue, and cleared similar amendments. Increasingly, states are taking the lead in recasting policy and that is entirely welcome.

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