The Right to No-Education

Some articles have the potential to baffle you. This is one of those articles.

April 1st is the third anniversary of Right to Education Act (RTE)'s implementation. The present Government of India considers RTE as one of it's major achievement. If you are one of those who prefer knowing what is currently happening in the country to watching Veena Malik's cheap item numbers, you might have seen Kapil SIbal with his Peter Pettigrew face claiming RTE as one of those milestone acts.

However this, as happens with most of his claims (remember the zero loss claim?) is far from true. One  of many things that RTE does is "It prohibits all unrecognized schools from practice." Now that might sound good, wouldn't it? But Wait! Houston we have a problem

"According to section 19 of the Act, schools require all-weather building, one classroom per teacher, adequate library facilities, separate toilets for girls and boys, drinking water facilities, and fencing and boundary walls, among other conditions, to get recognition. As the deadline looms, nearly three lakh unrecognised schools in the country are facing an uncertain future."

Yes, many of the prerequisites up there are essential and in theory, each and every school must have them but merely setting up this act without pondering over it's practicalities won't do us much good. With this act  the unrecognized private schools are facing the threat of imminent closure. Even if they did not close down,buying 800 square metres of land, setting up a playground, fencing, boundary walls, procuring no-objection certificates from local bodies and traffic police (don't even get into the bribery that it would involve); all this would require lot of cash and it might ultimately trickle down upon the poor students. Where do they go? Government schools?. Well I'm pretty sure they would still prefer going to such under-facilitated schools than government schools!

Anyways why do I I raise these problems? Isn't that something the mainstream media should have done rather than focusing on Mona Singh's morphed MMS or histrionics of stupid local party obsessed with becoming Prime Minister? 

A poor man in our country understands very well that getting educated is the only way, his child can have a better life than him. But for 60 years they have been cheated. The politician promises them quality education, collects taxes and in the end all they get is, well, Ghanta!

Why not focus on funding Schools rather? What's school funding? Here's Amit Varma's full article on that.