Go back to school

It comes as more of a shock than surprise that the states are yet to have enabling legislation to make primary education a fundamental right.

It comes as more of a shock than surprise that the states are yet to have enabling legislation to make primary education a fundamental right. The Centre, in a bid to share the burden that universal education entails (an additional Rs 53,000 cr annually as a central project), proposes through the 11th Plan that it’ll pick up 50 per cent of the tab for those states that will amend their education laws. States that refuse to either amend laws or create new ones for the purpose will receive 25 per cent of the funding. Clearly, a project even as crucial as
this, has to also suffer the laggardness of political negotiations. This, when in the first meeting of the council that oversees the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Universal Elementary Education) held more than a year ago in February 2005, the Prime Minister had called universal education the ‘iron law of development’ and urged for immediate action.

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The NDA’s constitutional amendment in 2002 failed to translate into a right to education bill. It is only now that the Centre has a model bill that it will send to the states to get them moving to make free primary education a right. That after two years of the introduction of the education cess, devised to meet the expenditure to achieve the above goal, the basic legislation is yet to be framed at the state level speaks volumes about the reason why more than a third of India’s population is illiterate. The education cess, it may be recalled, was one of the few taxes that met with little opposition, a testimony to the deep feelings of the average Indian in support of universal literacy and the value of education.

But actionable policy has not emerged from either the rhetoric, or the emotion. No wonder then that the UN has expressed concern, time and again, about India meeting the Millennium Development Goals. And every time, the Centre has been miffed about such ‘reports’. While India is well on its way to failing in its most basic duty, the HRD minister has dug in his heels on reservations in higher education professional institutes, which, if anything, is something that needs to be carefully thought through. The posturing over reservations, too, says a lot about the priorities of Indian politicians. They clearly prefer symbolism over substance.