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Most people in India don’t have access to sanitation.Therefore should Parliament enact a Right to Bathrooms Act? A right legislated is not a right delivered. If legislation guaranteed outcomes, then 420 million people in the nation’s labour force would be earning the minimum wage, enjoying Provident Fund security, pension and health insurance coverage. But India’s labour laws don’t apply to 93 percent of the country’s work force. In fact, our labour laws are so irrational that they are unenforceable.
Unfortunately, the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act), which became law on April 1 last year, threatens to drag education legislation in the direction of India’s labour laws. The RTE Act is not only unenforceable and will fail to improve learning outcomes, it will also breed corruption.
As state governments start codifying RTE Rules, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the RTE Act will impact capacity, cost and competition and generate corruption and confusion. As a company at the exit gate of the education system — TeamLease has hired an individual every five minutes for five years but only 5 percent of the youth who came to us for jobs — we recognise that fixing the school system (the prepare pipeline) may yield better socio-economic returns than fixing the vocational system (the repair pipeline).
The RTE Act timetables the extinction of 25 percent of India’s 1.5 million schools that are ‘unrecognised’. These mostly low-cost schools are an entrepre-neurial response to parental choice — the antibiotic reaction to dysfunctional government schools chronicled in The Beautiful Tree (Penguin, 2009) by Dr. James Tooley, professor of education at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, UK. Our demographic dividend — 1 million youth will join the labour force every month for the next 20 years — would have already become a nightmare if these low-budget unrecognised private schools had not substituted for absconding state government teachers during the past 20 years. And while many of these budget private schools may not deliver quality, they do deliver value for money. Plus a bad school is better than no school at all. Turning the ill-considered advice of a beheaded French queen to the public on its head, this provision of the RTE Act in effect says: “If you can’t have cake, don’t eat bread.”
The unfortunate outcome of enacting the much-awaited RTE Act will be higher school fees. The Act micro-specifies salaries, teacher qualifications and school infrastructure. It stipulates that schools in Delhi that don’t pay teachers a minimum salary of Rs.23,000 per month will not be accorded recognition, and mandates that primary teachers must have a two-year education diploma. This means that 33 percent of teachers currently employed in the national capital will have to be fired. Moreover, RTE specifies that every school must have a playground with the Delhi state government specifying 900 sq. yards and some others considering 1,500 sq. yards.
Then there’s the controversial s.12(1)(c), which requires all K-XII schools to reserve 25 percent of capacity in pre-school or class I for poor children from the neighbourhood. This provision will require massive cross subsidisation because state governments propose to reimburse way below tuition fees. The Karnataka state government has capped its reimbursement at Rs.7000 per student per year. All this micro-management of schools — to the delight of teachers and real estate companies — will hit middle-class parents who will be obliged to pay higher tuition fees to accommodate poor neighbourhood children, hard.
Competition has been a major driver of higher quality and lower tuition fees in higher education. Currently there are 200 engineering colleges in south India with less than ten new admissions this year, and more than a third of B-school seats in Gujarat are vacant. This forces colleges to reduce fees, guarantee internships and embed soft-skills learning into their curriculums. On the other hand the RTE Act hinders competition by making it impossible for school managements to reduce tuition fees and compete on price. This means stagnant capacity, and reduced competition. In short, schools won’t have student-clients, but hostages.
Many other questions arise from the provisions of this ill-conceived, interfering legislation. Does changed evaluation under RTE mean no exams? How will mid-day meals be provided to poor neighbourhood children forcibly admitted into private schools? Where will these children go after they complete class VIII? Will the 75 percent parents-dominated government school management committees have the power to hire and fire teachers? Why has the Act abolished school managements’ right to detain or expel students in classes I-VIII? Can children be equal and excellent simultaneously?
The only saving grace of RTE is that it’s badly designed legislation that will barely be implemented as it’s impossible to implement effectively. But should we really be banking on a double negative to encash our demographic dividend? The most important pre-natal decision an Indian child makes is of choosing her parents wisely. Sadly the RTE Act makes this choice even more important.
(Manish Sabharwal is the Bangalore-based founder-chairman of TeamLease Services Pvt. Ltd)