First, Right to Childhood

The Central and State governments, and the people as a whole, have to be involved in making the RTE Act work

by Col R Hariharan

HIGH expectations have been kindled with the coming into force of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 from April this year. Education Minister Kapil Sibal’s description of it as “a momentous step forward in our 100-year struggle for universalizing elementary education” summed up the hype built around it. Only, it should have come eight long years ago when the 86th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, ensuring children’s right to education as a fundamental right. Without the RTE Act, the 86th Amendment had remained where most of the other rights of Indians remain – on paper.

When the Amendment was passed, it was called “a historic milestone” in the country’s struggle for children’s right to education. If “a historic milestone” amendment is given teeth only after eight years, can we expect immediate change in the fate of millions of children deprived of this right?

Passing the RTE Act is not enough; for it to become effective, both states and Centre will have to take a whole set of “mundane” actions – political, legislative and budgetary. The process is somewhat like designing a concept car and marketing it as a viable model. A soothsayer would be as good as any bureaucrat or analyst in predicting when children will gain from the Act.

In certain States, run by feudal minded societies, the girl child is sentenced to die in bondage as a worker in fields, bonded labour or domestic help. Elected governments are reluctant to enforce existing laws to protect children due to the fear of offending rural vote banks. Caste panchayats continue to flourish as an extra-judicial authority to preserve exploitative practices. They pass death sentences and get away with murder 60 years after we proclaimed our fundamental rights. Vote bank politics is the only ideology.

To give form to RTE is a mammoth task on two counts – the sheer number of marginalized children, and the size and complexity of enforcing the Act in an amorphous federal system where the Centre and states rule over education. Sibal himself admits that though “over 100 per cent children are now in school, 98 per cent of our habitations have a primary school within one kilometre, and 92 per cent have an upper primary school within three kilometres,” there are “invisible” children outside this charmed circle. These are kids enrolled in school but who havedropped out to work in dhabas, petty shops or fields. In addition, there are a whole lot of children too poor to go to school or who live in remote areas where access to school is not there.

Realizing the complexity of the task, Sibal has spelled out a whole matrix of actions required to be taken by the various Ministries and governments both at the Central and state level. These are beyond Education Ministries; they range from Rural Development and Panchayati Raj to Women and Child Development departments because secondary initiatives are equally important to make RTE work.

Even within government schools, vast differences exist between Central and state-managed schools and between urban and rural schools. They range from inadequate infrastructure to insufficient staff and unrealistic policies that drive parents to seek private schools. That is why Sibal has attempted not merely to universalize education, but also to provide quality education and is seeking private sector participation. As the Act provides for 25 per cent reserved seats for poor children in all private schools as well as Central schools, private schools are up in arms.

States that are a little more “enlightened” on education like Kerala or Tamil Nadu have taken advantage of the Constitutional space provided to them in giving jurisdiction over education to States. Their literacy rates have increased dramatically. But the children of Tamil Nadu and Kerala also continue to drop out of school to work as domestic helps or in sweatshops and petty businesses. Tamil Nadu had gained notoriety for killings of girl children. Mothers are known to abandon girl children in government orphanages, creating a new genre of “cradle babies”.
Such aberrations exist as there is a large disconnect between legislative action and social perception. That is why many acts of redemption of children from hunger and poverty are announced with a lot of fanfare and then routinely ignored. At best, they taper into nothingness after handing out doles to kids, gestures meant more for photo opportunities for politicians than to make a difference in young lives.

Take the case of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme in Uttar Pradesh. It has been hit by a funds crunch from end-2009 onwards because the state government has not allocated any money for it. The reason: some districts have not submitted the last year’s expenditure report! So children everywhere in the state are going without nutritious food promised by the state. More than deprivation of nutrition, such callous acts reinforce in young minds the popular belief that governments generally don’t mean what they say. After all, Chief Minister Mayawati could find money to install a thousand statues of her mentor!

THE home truth is that everything in society and government is loaded against children’s right to childhood. Many a time, vengeful acts start at the foetal stage just because children belong to the wrong gender. And it has nothing to do with poverty or social status as female foeticide is as much practised by the educated in Punjab as the ignorant in Rajasthan. Not surprisingly, this has led to skewed gender ratios.

And there are other predators: child traffickers who turn them into prostitutes, beggars and petty thieves. Interstate child trafficking is a growing “business”, as illustrated by a recent case in Tamil Nadu in which 76 children between 12 and 14 years were rescued from Chennai and sent home to Manipur and Assam after a TV channel followed the trail of 200 children picked up in Manipur and sent to Chennai.
It will be a great achievement if we can give substance to the Right to Education for all children in the next five decades. So it is not only Sibal or the Central and state governments but the people as a whole who have to be involved in making the RTE Act work. And that has to be done in an environment VS Naipaul described as “chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men are not brothers and that luggage was in danger”.

Courtesy: GFiles Magazine, June 2010 issue.
URL: http://www.gfilesindia.com/title.aspx?title_id=136