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Passed by House in Aug, right to education yet to be law by Akshaya Mukul

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act was billed to be a giant leap towards universalization of education in India. However, it has acquired the dubious distinction of being the only fundamental right that exists just on paper.

More than seven years after the Constitution was amended in 2002 to make free and compulsory education to children in the age group of 6-14 a fundamental right and over four months after the historic Right to Education Bill was passed in Parliament, both the legislations are yet to be notified.

Without notification -- a mandatory step in that gives the exact date from when the law comes into force -- the right to free and compulsory education remains just a goal.

All along, the reason given for not notifying the constitutional amendment was that a law to enforce the fundamental right was not in place. Two years of NDA regime and five years of UPA 1 were spent quibbling over the cost of implementing such a legislation. The bill was finally passed by Parliament last August. Strangely, there is yet no movement towards notification.

HRD minister Kapil Sibal has been saying that the face of education will change completely with RTE Act. He is right. However, the trouble is that the objective will remain a distant dream so long as the great ideas of the legislation lack any legal teeth.

The ostensible reason for the delay in notifying the Act is that its cost is still being worked out. But those associated with its implementation point out that even as the cost is being debated there are other significant things that could have been done by notifying the RTE Act. HRD ministry has pegged the cost of RTE at Rs 1.71 lakh crore for five years. "Many reforms in the RTE Act do not cost money. Now if it is notified in the end of March to be applicable from April 1, state governments will be caught unawares. They will be unprepared without budget allocations. That could be a setback. Early notification would have helped put a system in place," a source said.

What happens if the Act is not notified? For one, all systemic reforms laid out in the RTE Act cannot be put in place without notification. These include maintaining a teacher-student ratio of 1:30. "If the Act was in place, steps could have been taken for redeployment of teachers to attain the stipulated ratio. This could have helped bridge the urban-rural imbalance in teacher-student ratio," a source said.

Similarly, provisions in section 29 of the Act that deal with curriculum and examination reforms could have been put in place. This section aims to free the child from the trauma of examinations and introduce comprehensive and continuous evaluation. It also talks of new learning methods. Even implementing the provision on setting up school management committees with adequate representation of parents would have acted as a watchdog, said sources.

"These provisions would have cost no money and yet are huge steps forward for systemic reforms," a source pointed out.

In the absence of notification, the HRD ministry for the past four months has been working on framing model rules for RTE and has set up a committee that will recommend how to harmonize the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan with RTE.