States may be asked to help fund education plan

Plans to implement the Right To Education (RTE) Act ensuring compulsory education for children in the age group 6-14 may place the Centre and state governments at loggerheads, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 20, 2009, 01:48:42 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Plans to implement the Right To Education (RTE) Act ensuring compulsory education for children in the age group 6-14 may place the Centre and state governments at loggerheads.

The Planning Commission has proposed substantial financial burden on state governments to implement the Act in the next five years, in three phases.

For the first phase, the state will have to bear 40 per cent of the total plan costs, in the second phase 45 per cent and in the third, 50 per cent. The remaining funds for the three phases will be borne by the Central government.

To fund this proposal, the commission believes it will have to spare Rs 1,42,000 crore in the next five years as against the HRD ministry’s estimate of Rs 1,74,000 crore.

“What the HRD ministry has estimated is an over-statement. We believe that with Rs 1,42,000 crore and with the help of state governments, RTE can be successfully implemented,” said a senior Planning Commission official on condition of anonymity.

The Parliament had in 2002 approved the Constitutional amendment providing the right to education. Since then, the Central government had failed to introduce a bill to implement the amendment as state governments refused to share the financial burden.

It was only in July 2009, when the Central government proposed that the 13th Finance Commission would decide the expenditure-sharing model, that the Parliament approved the Right to Education and Compulsory Education Bill without any dissent.

Apart from free education, the law stipulates a mandatory student-teacher ratio, basic school infrastructure and a parent grievance redressal mechanism.

HRD minister Kapil Sibal, while introducing the bill, had termed it as a landmark law in the field of “inclusive education”.

“We have provided the new formula on the basis of inputs from the Finance Commission,” the commission official said. “It is on the principle that the school education is primarily a state subject.”

Apart from sharing the burden of plan funds, the commission has also said that all the recurring expenses will be the state governments’ responsibility.

Recurring expenses would be about 20 per cent of the total plan allocation for RTE implementation.

There is also some opposition from the HRD ministry, which says Rs 1,42,000 crore is not enough to implement the RTE law.

HRD Minister Kapil Sibal had said that fewer funds will cause difficulties in implementing the law.

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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