HC orders Pune girl to be admitted through RTE quota based on mother’s caste certificate

A single judge bench of justice NJ Jamadar ordered the authorities to grant admission to Arohee Jadhav, 6, at the Aditya English Medium School in Pune through the RTE quota by July 31 without insisting on her late father’s caste certificate

MUMBAI: A child cannot be recognised solely by the caste of their father in all circumstances, the Bombay High Court has said, while striking down orders passed by education authorities denying admission to the daughter of a Pune-based widow through the 25% quota for underprivileged children under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act on the grounds that the woman could not produce her late husband’s caste certificate.

A single judge bench of justice NJ Jamadar ordered the authorities to grant admission to Arohee Jadhav, 6, at the Aditya English Medium School in Pune through the RTE quota by July 31 without insisting on her late father’s caste certificate.

A single judge bench of justice NJ Jamadar on Wednesday ordered the authorities to grant admission to Arohee Jadhav, 6, at the Aditya English Medium School in Pune through the RTE quota by July 31 without insisting on her late father’s caste certificate.

The bench said that the Pune education authorities’ orders had “the propensity to deprive the petitioner of the constitutionally guaranteed equality and the child of her fundamental right to have free and compulsory education”.

The court was hearing a petition filed by Arohee’s mother, Ranjana Jadhav, 35, a domestic worker belonging to the Dhangar community, a nomadic tribe. She had approached the high court after a taluka-level scrutiny committee rejected her plea to grant her daughter admission in the school for want of her late husband’s caste certificate. Her appeals against the order were also dismissed by the education officer and the deputy director of education in Pune.

Jadhav’s petition stated that she had submitted her own caste certificate with her daughter’s school application, as she had lost her husband in December 2021. However, the taluka-level committee rejected the plea. Her counsel, advocate Bhushan Raut, argued that the refusal infringed upon her child’s fundamental right to a life of dignity untrammelled by patriarchal bias in the society, and her right to free and compulsory education.

Accepting Jadhav’s argument, the court observed that a mother is considered a child’s natural guardian if the father is dead or incapable of discharging his parental responsibilities. “The insistence on the child being recognised, in all circumstances, solely by the caste of her father is not sustainable,” said justice Jamadar.

“In a given set of circumstances, where the child suffers from the disadvantages and discriminations, which the mother of the child has suffered, the child may legitimately take the caste of her mother,” the judge added.

The court said the authorities did not consider the matter from the perspective of the fundamental right of the petitioner’s daughter to free and compulsory education and looked at the matter from “a very myopic and constricted view”, especially when the deceased father’s school records show that he too belonged to the Dhangar community.

“The constitutional guarantee of free and compulsory education to children and the substantive equality could not have been sacrificed at the altar of procedural rigidity of production of caste certificate of the father of the child,” the court said.