[COLOR=red][SIZE=4]Vitally important flawed legislation[/SIZE] [/COLOR]
img:21:Sathi Alur The overall aim and objective of the Free and Compulsory Education for Children Bill, 2003, to give effect to the 86th Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the fundamental right to education for all children in the age group six-14, is laudable. The bill was scheduled to be introduced in the winter session but was withheld. However there is a clear danger that it may disappear into the limbo of oblivion now that a general election looms on the horizon.
Nevertheless on the off chance that it may (or should) be debated, this is important legislation with deep ramifications for the future which requires informed comment and amendment prior to being enacted into law. Political parties should consider it while framing their manifestos. Future national law-makers should be briefed about its infirmities so that it can be discussed and transformed into meaningful, socially beneficial legislation.
It’s sad but true that in its current form this bill is likely to hinder rather than help elementary education because it essentially side-steps the all-important issue of ‘education for all on an equal basis’. Confronted with the massive problem of 60 million out-of-school children and another 60 million who are in school but cannot read or write, the bill fudges the issue of quality of education for all and draws distinctions between children from differing social and economic backgrounds.
Indeed in its current form it legitimises the inequity of children from different strata of society being provided differing quality education by private, municipal and local authority schools; special schools, and socially distinguishable education all the way down to ‘Education Guara-ntee Centres’. The definition of a school (schedule ‘A’ of the circulated bill) is set so low that it is laughable at the turn of the 21st century.
Secondly, the bill makes grand promises while fudging the financial commitments needed to fulfill them. It empowers the Union government to levy a cess on any ‘item’, ‘activity’ or ‘transaction’ to finance this bill. The regressive nature of such a cess (in effect a new education tax) has not been thought through, and the business community as also the general citizenry have not been apprised of its implications.
Third, the bill offers an opportunity for education ministry officials to report full enrollment even if all children in a local area are not in school. This is because it provides four escape clauses to make out-of-school children in this country invisible. Education ministry officials of the state governments are permitted to report full enrollment if: there is no school in the neighbourhood; if out-of-school children are disabled; if children are already enrolled in a recognised school (if they are enrolled in a recognised school why should they be excused from the head count?) and for any other reason the ministry deems appropriate.
Fourth, under the provisions of the bill the fundamental right to education is permitted to be bestowed in bits and pieces as and when the government determines. The bill provides for a notification process when it becomes operational. It also provides for separate dates for notification of starting dates of each provision of the bill. So while we may have a bill on the statute books duly enacted by Parliament, the government cannot be forced to deliver its specific provisions unless they are operationalised by notification.
Fifth, though the bill claims to have been designed to meet the global EFA (Education For All) target of 2015, the Union HRD ministry is committed to reaching this goal by 2010. But the 2010 deadline has already been missed. For eight years of schooling to be available to all children by 2010, every child in the age group of six-14 should already have been in school from the beginning of last year. This has obviously not happened!
Sixth, while the bill claims to meet the global EFA agenda and to be in sync with the World Bank’s Fast Track Initiative, at the recent Third High Level meeting of global education ministers in New Delhi, prime minister Vajpayee was compelled to admit that India’s EFA programme is neither ‘fast’ nor on ‘track’. This prompted Union HRD minister Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, who seems more preoccupied with higher education and literacy statistics, to pass the buck to the lack of external financing for education in the country. But prior to opening their purse strings, external donors are looking for mechanisms that would sincerely address the issue of 60 million out-of-school children and quality of education dispensed to those who are in schools.
Yet perhaps the most pernicious provision of this bill is that it provides for setting up ‘special schools’ to cater to India’s estimated 40 million disabled children. This despite the total number of special schools built in the past 50 years aggregating a mere 3,200 catering to some 10 percent of the disabled child population. Moreover elementary arithmetic suggests that the government will need to construct about 40,000 special schools to enroll all disabled children pursuing a curriculum! That this is mere rhetoric is seen in the exclusionary provision: if there is no normal school that will admit a disabled child and there is no special school in the neighbourhood, the disabled child will be counted as being in school or as invisible for statistical purposes!
In the final analysis it’s not a question of how many new schools and how many children enrolled. The vital central issue is the quality of education offered to every child. The real question is whether as a nation we are ready to address the underlying causes of the massive exclusion of the girl, the poor and the disabled child from the education system. If these issues are not discussed and debated in Parliament and beyond, it will perpetuate the massive fraud visited upon the nation’s unfortunate children for the past half century.
[B](Sathi Alur is a Mumbai-based economist and financial advisor to the National Resource Centre for Inclusion)[/B]