With the Right of all Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act mandating a 30:1 teacher pupil ratio and laying down minimum qualifications for teachers, state governments have expressed concerns about the lack of infrastructure to provide the required training. Only diploma-holders in elementary education are allowed to teach students from Class I to V and there is a shortage of teachers in this category. As per the HRD Ministry, of the...

Classrooms give shelter to cows and buffaloes, while students sit outside in the compound. Children carry their own plates to school for mid-day meals and later rush back home on the pretext of washing the dishes, but never come back for classes. School management committees are told by teachers that no one has the right to seek any information from the school authorities. The scenario gets worse if the panchayat facilitators...

Lakhs of children waiting to take the entrance test for admission into the prestigious Navodaya Vidyalayas can now finally appear for the take relief as the law ministry has finally said that these schools can be exempted from two key provisions of the Right to Education Act. However, the law ministry has asked HRD ministry to take the precaution of issuing the necessary notification exempting these schools from the RTE...

A year after the Right of all Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act came into effect, four states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Manipur — have applied for relaxation of teacher qualification norms, citing lack of teacher training institutes. Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal have already secured relaxation under Section 23 (a) of the RTE Act, which enables them to employ those without the professional qualifications — a...

-The Indian Express   The Right to Education Act, or RTE, has been justly criticised as forcing all of India’s educational establishments into a bureaucratic straitjacket. Its aim is laudable and urgent: to ensure that every Indian child has access to an education that meets certain minimum standards. But figuring out those standards is hard, and this is where Delhi’s tendency to obsessively centralise, divorced from the actual realities of education...