Negation of diluted commitment
In August this year, the Congress-led UPA government betrayed India’s children yet again. This government, elected with a specific mandate to universalise elementary education, has withdrawn the Right to Education Bill (RTE) 2005 from Parliament and passed the buck, quite literally, to the states in the form of a Model Right to Education Bill 2006. Now the states are advised to enact it into legislation. Moreover in a supreme irony, the new Bill absolves the State of the constitutional responsibility it belatedly acknowledged in 2002, and seeks instead to hold parents of out-of-school children (in the six-14 age group) accountable for truancy. Then in a token gesture few weeks ago, the Union government extended the provisions of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 to proscribe employment of children in two additional ‘hazardous industries’ — domestic households and the hospitality sector. Even on the off-chance the new provisions, unlike the existing ones, are actually enforced and employers of children prosecuted, the Act provides no alternatives — education, nutrition, shelter or livelihood — to the children it purports to ‘liberate’.
The National Sample Survey 2000 reported that 16.4 million Indian children aged 5-14 years were "engaged in economic activities and domestic or non-remunerative work". This is in addition to the 46 million ‘missing’ children of school-going age who are unaccounted for, neither enrolled in school nor officially working.
Across India’s cities, towns and villages, toiling children are a familiar sight. Herding and grazing cattle, constructing buildings and roads, sweating away in factories, waiting on customers in restaurants, cleaning middle class homes, fetching and carrying in offices, even serving clients in the commercial sex trade. So familiar, that we’ve stopped seeing them as disenfranchised citizens, even as children.
The saga of broken promises began in 1950, when the authors of our Constitution made universal education a desirable objective that future governments should strive to attain, rather than a legal compulsion. It took more than 40 years thereafter for the Supreme Court to rule that education is in fact, a de facto constitutional right. And it was only in 2002, thanks to relentless advocacy by child rights activists and parents across the country, that the Constitution was formally amended to make education an explicit fundamental right. Despite its less than universal scope (it leaves out pre-school children under six years of age), failure to define quality standards and imposition of the onus for compliance on parents rather than the State, the 86th Amendment marked the first hard commitment to education by independent India.
Unfortunately the new Model Right to Education Bill negates even this diluted and belated commitment. Despite its inherent flaws, the RTE Bill 2005 had some provisions such as reservation of 25 percent capacity for weaker sections in all state, aided and unaided schools. Now under the Model Bill, free and compulsory education has been restricted only to state and fully-aided schools. Further it betrays the trust that millions of tax-payers placed in the government’s promise to universalise education via the 2 percent education cess levied since July 2004. Transparent public accounting of the Rs.7,000 crore collected through this cess is urgently needed.
A Goldman Sachs report that projects India’s growth to one of the top four global economies by 2050 is mandatory reading in academic and corporate circles worldwide. Of the four countries named in that report — Brazil, Russia, India and China — only India does not guarantee children at least eight years of schooling. Instead, with over 60 million children presumed to be working, India has at least one claim to global leadership — it’s home to the largest child labour population on the planet.
For many years, child rights activists across the country have been demanding the following with limited success:
•
Increase government expenditure on education to 10 percent and health to 5 percent of GDP •
All children aged six-18 years, without discrimination, should be in formal, full-time schools that provide quality education. All children below six should be in anganwadis•
Complete prohibition on all forms of child labour across all sectors of the economy, including agriculture•
Revision of the National Policy for Children (1974) to make it more comprehensive and in line with the Constitution and the United Nations Convention of Child Rights•
Redraft the Free and Compulsory Education Bill to remove sanctions on parents and impose a penalty on governments for failing to provide free, compulsory education to allMillions of children across India are fighting insuperable obstacles and incredible odds to attain their rights. The Model Right to Education Bill 2006 which has been left to the discretion of notoriously child-unfriendly state governments has pushed the universal education goal further beyond reach.
(Ingrid Srinath is chief executive, Child Rights and You (CRY))