The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009

Much of the discussion on the Right to Education Act, 2009 has ignored the point that the passage of such a law has actually missed an excellent opportunity to address the systemic and fundamental problems of school education in India. Whether it is the question of access to all in a definite time frame, or improving quality with concrete provision of funds, taking education out of the current state of persistent underfunding despite the longstanding commitment to provide 6 percent of the GDP for education, it failed to meet the vision behind the Constitutional amendment that made education a fundamental right in Article 21A. Besides, this law perpetuates the multi-layer discriminating school system in India and reduces the notion of education to functional literacy, excluding a vast number of children in the age group of 0 to 5 at the pre-primary level and 16 to 18 in the secondary level from the ambit of universal and compulsory education. In fact, several of the measures mentioned in the Act may be devices to distract attention from the systemic problems facing school education.