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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Post-RTE, fate of lakhs of kids in limbo by Rema Nagarajan

Post-RTE, fate of lakhs of kids in limbo by Rema Nagarajan

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published Published on Apr 3, 2010   modified Modified on Apr 3, 2010


Even as the Right to Education came into effect on Thursday, the countdown began for lakhs of unrecognised schools across the country against whom action can be taken under the new law unless they get themselves regularized within the next three years. The task of enforcing this regularization will be humungous if studies indicating the proliferation of unrecognized schools are to be believed.

In 2005, in a survey in seven districts in Punjab, Prof Arun Mehta of National University of Educational Planning and Administration found that out of 3,000-plus private schools, 86% were unrecognized with over 3.5 lakh children enrolled in them. Another similar report of 2000 based on a survey in four districts of Haryana states that out of 2,000-plus private schools, 41% (over 850) were unrecognized.

As far back as 1996, the Public Report on Basic Education in India (PROBE) survey in five states — UP, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh — which conducted a complete census of all schools in 188 sample villages found that 63% of the existing private schools were unrecognized. It is estimated that even Andhra Pradesh has as many as 10,000 unrecognized schools. In Delhi, the government seems clueless about the number of unrecognized schools in the capital with the figures quoted ranging from over 1,500 to nearly 10,000 — catering to about six lakh children.

Prof Yash Aggarwal of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration in his 2000 report based on the Haryana survey had said that the number of unrecognized schools was doubling every five years and that if the trend continued, the number of unrecognized schools could be roughly 1.5 to 2 times the number of government-run primary schools. With no official survey including unrecognized schools, there is no saying if Aggarwal's prediction has already come true. Prof Mehta observed in his 2005 report that children who were not enrolled in formal recognized schools were all being treated as out-of-school, which may not always be true.

"When the government does not even know where or how many such unrecognised schools exist, how will it ensure regularization of these schools? Awareness about the law is low even in Delhi government and we need to question the government on how they intend to implement the law," says Ashok Aggarwal of Social Jurists, the organization that filed a case in the high court on the quality of education in unrecognized schools.

There is no immediate panic and nothing is going to change overnight because the HRD ministry has given time to the unrecognized schools to get recognition. But the emphasis seems to be on physical infrastructure or input to get recognition rather than output. "Establishing physical infrastructure is easily done. But you need to measure the outcome. You need to see if physical infrastructure translates into learning among children," says Shailendra Sharma of Pratham, an organization which works on providing quality education and which has been conducting annual surveys on learning levels of students.

Interestingly, every survey on unrecognized schools shows that learning achievements in these schools are as good if not better than recognized government schools. These surveys have also shown that they fare better on several counts like pupil-teacher ratio, students to classroom ratio, number of classrooms, physical infrastructure like toilets and computers, and better qualified teachers, majority of them with little or no professional training.

The HRD ministry has given such schools five years to get their teachers professionally trained. Considering the sheer number of unrecognized schools in the country and the lakhs of children enrolled in them, the government can no longer afford to ignore these schools when formulating a policy to universalize access to education under the new law.


The Times of India, 4 April, 2010, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/Post-RTE-fate-of-lakhs-of-kids-in-limbo/articleshow/5758626.cms


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