HRD ministry not averse to include pre-school education under RTE

The HRD ministry is not averse to including pre-school education under the watershed Right To Education (RTE) Act but says it will study its implications before making a decision.

Updated on: Jul 29, 2011, 22:51:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The HRD ministry is not averse to including pre-school education under the watershed Right To Education (RTE) Act but says it will study its implications before making a decision.

The National Advisory Council had asked the HRD ministry to examine bringing pre-school education under the ambit of RTE Act saying that in absence of any regulatory mechanism the children enrolled in pre-school remain neglected.

The NAC wanted the children in the age group of four and five years should also be covered under the law as it is the poor children, who are deprived of pre-school education.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked the HRD ministry to study the NAC recommendations and said a decision would be taken in August.

A Planning Commission working group on elementary education for the 12th five year plan is examining the suggestion. “Most members are of the view that pre-school education should be part of NAC,” said a senior plan panel official, adding that the commission was working on its possible financial implications.

The HRD ministry has decided that the sub-group of the Central Advisory Board of Education to examining the possibility of extending the law to cover secondary education up to class 10 will be asked to look into the inclusion of pre-school learning.

The possible change in law can have both administrative and financial implications. Welfare of children below the age of six year is domain of the Women and Child Development ministry, which runs Integrated Child Development Scheme. And, the ministry does not have expertise on educational issues.

Unlike elementary education, only a few state governments have pre-schools. Providing infrastructure for pre-schools would be huge, a plan panel official said. It will mean adding four crore children into the formal education system and construction of additional 10 lakh classrooms.

The ministry has also said that madarsas does not come under the definition of schools under the RTE Act and therefore, the provisions of the law are not applicable to these religious schools.

The ministry had already issued a guideline in November 2010 saying that madarsas are protected under section 29 and 30 of the Constitution and RTE law does not come in the way of continuance of such institutions or the rights of children in such institutions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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