-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...

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...

Like the majority of India's children, the Right to Education (RTE) Act has completed its first year facing malnourishment, neglect and routine criticism. A year after it was notified as law, the right to elementary education remains a dream. The law provides a 5-year window to its implementation but the dream it legislates looks as elusive now as it did when this countdown started. While one important clause is facing...

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act was passed in August 2009 — a momentous decision, if decades too late. Since last April, when it started functioning, the state has been required, by law, to provide a neighbourhood school that meets a minimum standard within three years. The act mandates a whole range of measures to upgrade the number and quality of schools, like specified teacher-student ratios, making sure...

Even as India celebrates an impressive jump in the literacy figures in the past decade, a staggering eight million children are still out of school. Worse, 21 per cent of the teachers at the primary level are without adequate qualification and as many as 9 per cent schools have only the one teacher. Releasing the achievements in the first year of implementation of The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory...