Sept. 23, 2009
To
Dr. Manmohan Singh,Prime Minister,
Government of India,
South Block, New Delhi -110001
LETTER OF DISAPPOINTMENT
Dear Sir,
I wish to express my deep sense of disappointment with ‘The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009’ signed by the President last month. After waiting for this Fundamental Right for six decades, India’s almost 46 crore children up to 18 years of age expected a characteristically different Act. It is our considered view that this is an anti-Constitutional, anti-education and anti-child Act that denies Fundamental Right to education of equitable quality – a Right that has existed in the Constitution since 1950, as declared by the Hon’ble Supreme Court through its historic Unnikrishnan Judgment (1993).
This Act,
guarantees only conditional and arbitrary free education; even this is provided
only to a category of children while denying it to others;
shall maintain the prevailing multi-layered school system, thereby
continuing with education rooted in inequality and discrimination;
envisages sub-standard and inferior quality education for almost three-fourths
of India’s children, including the dalits, tribals, most OBCs and the minorities,and particularly the girls in each of these categories, thus failing to provide education of equitable quality;
distorts the universally accepted definition of Neighborhood School, thereby
authorizing the government to arbitrarily compel the poor children to study in
inferior quality schools;
undermines the universally accepted pedagogic role of the mother tongue in
acquiring knowledge and learning languages other than one’s mother tongue,
including English;
misconceives the universally acknowledged concept of disability and fails to
provide for norms and standards necessary for integrating disabled children
intoregular schools;
discriminates between the children studying in government schools and the
private unaided schools in various ways, particularly by providing for
deployment of the government school teachers for a range of non-teaching
tasks;
legitimizes and promotes privatization of school education under the pretext
of providing free education to the weaker sections on 25% of the seats in
private schools; this misconceived provision would not give any benefit
whatsoever to the deprived children even in the short term;
allows for shifting of public funds and other critical public resources for
privatization and commercialization of education, as part of the ‘free market’
policy of Public Private Partnership in its various forms, including school
vouchers, sale or handing over (‘adoption’) of government schools to private
parties, tax exemptions and subsidies (both direct and hidden);
does not empower the appropariate government to regulate arbitrary fee-hikes
by private schools, thus opening the flood gates for unabashed profiteering;
neither guarantees early childhood care and pre-primary education nor
provides for Right to secondary education viz. from class IX to XII, thus
disentitling more than 26 crore children of their Right to equal opportunities to participate in national economy; and
enables the State, by not including the financial estimates for implementation
of the Act in the Financial Memorandum, to abdicate its Constitutional
obligations for guaranteeing adequate funds for school education.
We are convinced that the implementation of this Act would lead to,·
. abdication of the State’s Constitutional obligation for providing free and
compulsory education of equitable quality;
· steady demolition of the government school system, except the schools of specified categories (Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas, XI plan’s 6,000 model
schools, and similar elite schools of the States/UT governments); and
· increase in the pace of unregulated privatization and commercialization of school education.
I wish to register our dismay also because not one public hearing has been held since the drafting of this Act began in November 2004 by the CABE’s Committee chaired by Shri Kapil Sibal, the then Minister of State for S & T under the previous UPA regime. An opportunity for public hearing was also denied even when the Bill was sent to the concerned Parliamentary Standing Committee in December 2008. Further, our appeal to the Lok Sabha Speaker stood ignored. This violation of the democratic traditions of India has resulted in a wide-spread feeling of grave injustice in the public mind and rising resentment against the Act.
Finally, you have missed an historical opportunity by not designing this Act in the framework of a Common School System based on Neighborhood Schools – a system that would be fully government-funded but governed democratically in a decentralized manner with participation of local bodies and the community, particularly the parents. We are sure you know that such a system has been practiced successfully in most of the advanced economies of the world, including the G-8 countries. In case you had heeded the rising public demand for such a system in the country, your government would have won immense political goodwill among the masses. We dare suggest that it is still not too late. You have enough time under your leadership to retract the retrogressive Act and build a new vision of India’s education by moving towards the long awaited Common School System based on Neighborhood schools. This indeed is the only historical option in school education India has.
Hoping for your decisive intervention in this matter of critical importance for the survival of India as a democratic, egalitarian, secular and enlightened society,
Thanking you,
Yours truly,
(Sarita Kumari)
Sashaktanari Action Forum
cc:
Smt. Sonia Gandhi,
Chairperson, UPA
24, Akbar Road,
New Delhi, 110011
