Education-for-all Bill to be tabled in winter session

The Right to Education Bill, seeking to make education mandatory for all children in the age group of six to 14 years and reduce the dropout rate, will be introduced in the winter session of Parliament, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 1, 2008, 24:39:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Right to Education Bill, seeking to make education mandatory for all children in the age group of six to 14 years and reduce the dropout rate, will be introduced in the winter session of Parliament.

The Union Cabinet approved the Bill on Thursday, reserving 25 per cent of seats for economically disadvantaged students in private schools.

“The law will help in dramatically reducing the dropout rate, which is as high as 50 per cent at the elementary level,” an HRD ministry official, preferring anonymity, said. He added that about 93 per cent of the children in the age group are in schools.

However, the private schools will have to bear a considerable part of the elementary education expenses of poor children, as they will be reimbursed what the states expend on a child in government schools.

The Delhi government spends Rs 1,300 per month per child in a government school against the public school fees ranging between Rs 3,000 and Rs 4,000 per month per student.

“Parents not in the disadvantaged category will have to pay for the education of the disadvantaged because schools don’t have funds,” said S.L. Jain, chairperson of Progressive Schools Conference, a body of top private schools in India. He demanded that the government pay the entire cost.

The Centre has estimated that over Rs 200,000 crore will be required in the next five years to implement the law.

The Cabinet agreed to a Group of Ministers’ recommendation that the Finance Commission will decide on the cost-bearing mechanism to meet tuition fees and costs of building new classrooms and schools.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said, “It would be a legally enforceable duty of the Centre and the states to provide free and compulsory education.”

The draft Bill also said the district education officer would be responsible for implementing the law.

An HRD ministry official, preferring anonymity, said the draft law was comprehensive and had enough teeth to cover all the aspects of elementary education.

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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