Excuses to keep poor students out of RTE

The state that proudly lays claim to Savitribai Phule, one of India’s first teachers who braved physical attacks to ensure the most deprived got educated, has asserted that the right to education is not an absolute right.

That’s what the Maharashtra government told the Bombay High Court in defence of its new rule aimed at diluting the Right to Education Act. The court quashed the rule, but, as often happens with matters that land up in court, the damage seems to have already been done.

In February, the Maharashtra government introduced a rule which said that private unaided schools would be exempt from admitting 25% poor students free of charge as stipulated under the RTE Act, if there existed a government school within 1 km of these schools. Expectedly, this rule was challenged and the Bombay High Court stayed it.

However, by the time the judgment holding it unconstitutional came, it was late July. Not only had the new term started, but private schools had also filled up the 25 per cent quota reserved for poor students, with regular paying ones.

Knowing that the rule had been challenged — indeed, the Association of Indian Schools had itself intervened in the matter — the ethical course for private schools would have been to keep those seats vacant till the judgment came. Their unseemly hurry to fill them up with paying seats can be attributed partly to the government’s negligence in reimbursing them the fees of those economically weak students, as mandated under the RTE Act. The Maharashtra government owes Rs 2,400 crore to schools in RTE fees since 2017.

Mindful that the paying students were not at fault, the court ordered that while these extra admissions should not be cancelled, the 25% quota for poor students must be filled up, even if that meant increasing the number of students per classroom.

Now, that’s become an excuse for some schools not to admit poor students this year. The CBSE schools say that classroom sizes cannot be increased without permission from the Board, and the deadline to apply for that has passed.

Is this a valid reason? Can the CBSE cite procedure to negate a court order? Or is the real reason the reluctance of private schools to admit students from deprived backgrounds into their classrooms?

The moment the RTE Act became law, private unaided schools rushed to the Supreme Court to challenge it. In 2012, the court upheld it, pointing to the Directive Principle on universal free education.

Interestingly, Maharashtra is not the first state to try and help private unaided schools wriggle out of their responsibility to provide free education to a small number of economically weak children. Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Karnataka preceded it.

As referenced in the Bombay High Court judgment, only in Karnataka was the rule upheld by the court. It is surprising that the Maharashtra government didn’t learn from the experience of UP and HP, but then this is a government bent on restricting educational access to the most deprived children.

Last year too, the government tried to reduce the number of those seeking admission to private schools under the RTE, making admission conditional on them producing Aadhaar cards, even though this was not mandated by the Union government.

This determination to filter out the most vulnerable from the educational system became evident right from Devendra Fadnavis’ first term in office. The education minister in 2017 announced the government’s intention to close schools which had less than 10 children attending them.

The low attendance was ascribed by the minister to the “poor quality of education” in these schools; but the same minister later admitted that such schools were too “unviable” for the government to run. These schools would be replaced by ‘cluster schools’, it was said, and no child would be deprived of education.

However, as foretold by educationists, the gradual closure of such schools did result in many of the poorest students in the state’s remote and tribal-dominated areas, especially girls, being forced to drop out, while the first ‘cluster school’ was opened only last year. Even that has not attracted all the students it was meant to.

It would be foolish to expect this government to make up for its lapse and ensure that all those who qualify under the RTE Act this year get admission. Once again, activists will have to fight.

(The writer is a senior journalist)