Right to Education Act: Significance, guarantees, gaps and reforms

Find out what guarantees the Right to Education Act or RTE Act entails and what gaps still remain unfulfilled.

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The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, more widely known as the Right to Education Act 2009(RTE), guarantees free education to children from the age of 6 to 18. The Parliament of India enacted this act on August 4, 2009 and came into force on April 1, 2010. This enforcement of this act made India one of 135 countries in the world that have education as a fundamental right.

Government responsibilities under RTE

• Providing free elementary education for every child from the age of six to fourteen years; and ensuring compulsory admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by every child from the age of six to fourteen years.
• Ensuring the availability of a neighbourhood school as specified in section 6.
• Ensuring that the child belonging to the weaker section and the child belonging to the disadvantaged group are not discriminated against and prevented from pursuing and completing elementary education on any grounds.
• Providing infrastructure including school buildings, teaching staff and learning equipment;
• Providing a special training facility is specified in section 4.
• Ensuring and monitoring admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by every child.
• Ensuring good quality elementary education conforms to the standards and norms specified in the schedule.
• Ensuring timely prescribing of curriculum and courses of study for elementary education.
• Providing training facilities for teachers.

Significance and implementation

India Today spoke to Senior Education Specialist at ChildFund India, Aekta Chanda, to understand the significance of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009.

On the significance of the act, she said, "Right to education act has deep significance for India, as it has a paradigm shift in terms of education in India, it was born out of a long movement and has direct connection with the essence of the constitution."

She then explained, "India being a democratic country, it becomes imperative that its citizens are educated and for that to happen it is important that education is universalized."

"The right to education made it a legally imperative and put this onus of ensuring free and compulsory education for all on the government," she said.

How has RTE improved the education infrastructure?

Aekta Chanda explained, "The major impact that right to education has had on the Indian education system, is the fact that it led to an unprecedented increase in the enrollment rate of children in the country."

"Physical infrastructure has improved, in terms of building, classrooms and so on. However, in terms of requirements like pupil teacher ratio and so on, not much progress has been made," she added.

Major challenges to RTE implementation

• Lack of financial allocation for the implementation of RTE: For more than two decades there has been a long-standing demand for educationists to allocate at least 6% of GDP to education, but it has never reached this figure. At present, the compliance rate is a mere 12.7%.
• Apathy towards public education system: Slowly and systematically, an apathy has been established towards the public education system. In fact, it has become a status symbol in many middle-class homes these days to send their children to private schools, sending to public school is seen as below dignity. There is a need to start visualizing the public school system as common community resources and need to be owned, monitored, and valued by the community.

• Stratified and patriarchal society: Stratified and patriarchal society and resistance to the egalitarian view that creates and values a child's agency and perceives learning as experiential meta-cognitive experience driven towards developing critical-thinking sensitive citizens. That is why it emphasizes activity-based learning, no detention policy, and so on, these were not well received.

What reforms are needed?

The following reforms may be made to the Right to Education Act as per Aekta Chanda:

• Extension of age: The act needs to include 3-6 age groups and 14-18 age groups. Though the NEP-2020 has given some indications towards the same, it is important to include the age group of the RTE act, which is currently 6-14 years to 3-18 years.