Right to education : vexing problems

The Right of Children to free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 received the assent of the President of India on 26th August 2009, and the same was notified in the Gazette of India, New delhi, Thursday, August 27, 2009 [Bhadra 5, 1931].


It is an Act to provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years.
Under the Act, section 2 [n] defines a ‘school’ as those institutions imparting elementary education, and includes schools that receive funds from the government and unaided schools not receiving government funds. ‘Elementary education’ means the education from grades 1 through 8.


While the government shall provide free and compulsory education to every child, parents who do not avail of this facility and send their kids to private schools shall not be entitled to make a claim for reimbursement of expenditure incurred on elementary education in such schools.

In other words, any old rickshawallah cannot demand admission to DPS.

However Minority schools and unaided schools shall admit to the extent of at least twenty five percent of the strength in class one, children belonging to weaker sections and disadvantaged groups from the neighbourhood, and the school will be reimbursed according to government rates per child. Of course, if the school is operating on land donated by the government, then it is not entitled to reimbursement.

The state government will be framing the rules under the Act in consonance with the model rules provided by the centre. I will be raising some of the issues that are being thrown up as Bihar grapples with 'how' to implement the Act in my blog Frank Opinions as we go along.

This post and others are here because feedback from thinking citizens is necessary. Links to this blog and the comments are being sent to relevant decision makers in order to broaden the RTE debate.