The Right to Education (RTE) Act was spun by Man Mohan’s government on 1^st April (April fool’s day) 2010 with the vision to provide free and compulsory education to the children of the age group of 6 to 14. The significance of the date of enforcement of this Act became clear after three years on 31^st March, the deadline for meeting the norms failed when almost 90% of the schools couldn’t comply with the RTE act.

The RTE Act aims to provide compulsory schooling to all children in the 6-14 age groups. It also planned to mandate the teachers training across India, bring the student-teacher ratio to 30:1 in primary schools, and improve infrastructure facilities like playgrounds, drinking water and separate girl’s toilets. Besides this, it also offers for the reservation of 25% of seats in all private schools for underprivileged children living in the neighborhood.

As the law states that schools would be derecognized if they fail to fulfill the guidelines of the norms in the act, as soon as recognition is withdrawn from school they should close down, ultimately leading to shortage of schools again and making a space for more corruption in form of bribes to extend the deadline. Also the main cause of failure of this act is lack of infrastructure and shortage of teachers which itself indicates the incapability of the government to materialize their plans into action.

Ironically the majority of the schools which failed to meet the deadline are government funded schools, which reflects that there is a loop hole in government educational system. This loop points out to the policies and funds which government failed to provide for the better implication of the RTE Act since 1960. According to Ambarish Rai, national convener RTE Forum’s, “The government must be held accountable and made answerable for its lack of political will also there is no road map either with the government, which can plan ahead in terms of meeting the RTE norms urgently.”

Still there are 90% schools are yet to comply with the norms of RTE. As per the Section 19 (5) of the RTE Act, school recognition will be withdrawn if the school is incapable to comply with the norm, and if there any violation observed against this act, schools are liable to pay fine extending to Rs. 1 lakh. Hence, it is a fair assumption that such condition would soon emerge whereby bribes will be extracted for delaying De-recognition of recognized schools that do not meet the input norms and for letting unrecognized schools to function. It will be obvious; that poor students will fall to this trap as they will be forced to pay higher fees as cover-up act reimburse these bribes.

Another most important point which led to the failure of this act is shortage of teaching staff. According to Kapil sibal there is a shortage of 1.2 million teachers in the country, leading to student /teacher ratio of 30:1 in 40% of the school in the country.  Shockingly among these teachers available 7.74 lakh teachers are untrained or ill-qualified for their jobs which itself prove to be the point for failure of RTE. This facts have already effected the quality of education in the country, where the latest Annual Status of Education Report 2012 (ASER 2012), published by NGO Pratham, indicates the sharp decline in student achievements from levels that were already low.

Another provision in the law abolishes board examinations and grants automatic promotion to each child to the next grade at the end of the academic year, this provision might increase the number of students passing the exams but will lead to the degradation of the quality of the education and system. As this might increase self-satisfaction among teachers and reduce student achievements.

 As this law might be a failure due to the deadline which requires schools to satisfy a highly demanding input most of which is unrelated to educational outcome. In a long run RTE might achieve the statistics indicating the increase in numbers of students enrolled in schools but will lead to the more mess, corruption and degradation of especially government education system in country again widening the gaps between ‘haves’ and ‘Have nots’.

Article Posted By : prajwal316  On November 15, 2013lView All Articles

Article Source :

http://www.veethi.com/articles/right-to-education-act-article-2825.htm

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education act