On Thursday — April 1 — India will join a group of few countries in the world, with a historic law making education a fundamental right of every child coming into force. Making Elementary education an entitlement for children in the 6-14 age group, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 will directly benefit close to one crore children who do not go to school at present. In...

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE Act) will be notified on April 1. The Act attempts to address the historical problem of continuing illiteracy as well as the lack of educational opportunities that persist for sections of our population even sixty years after adoption of the Indian constitution. The socio-political, legal and financial aspects of the Act have been much debated and its final form...

Ten days before it comes into force, the Right to Education Act has been challenged in the Supreme Court as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private and minority schools. One of the petitioners’ main complaints is that the act will force these schools to teach up to a fourth of their students free of cost if they come from the neighbourhood. Another is that the schools cannot even pick and...

Government policy towards school education is schizophrenic. While on the one hand, it is working on rules to set up, to begin with, 2,500 public private partnership schools as a means to see how it can increase private sector involvement in providing education to the underprivileged (economically or socially) in a bigger way; on the other, it is all set to virtually nationalise Elementary education in the country through the...

The countdown for implementation of the historic Right to Education Act from April 1 has begun. Complete with a new message - `Elementary education of equitable quality is now the right of every child' - and a short awareness film, HRD minister Kapil Sibal has asked chief ministers to cooperate in universalising Elementary education. Though Sibal has chosen to launch RTE from Delhi instead of some educationally deprived state, his...