With no exception

A bill giving children the right to education was finally passed by the Rajya Sabha on Monday. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill comes seven years after Parliament amended the Constitution to incorporate that right,and in its current form appears to address most of the key concerns. Its eventual passage through Parliament must therefore be followed up with responsive implementation. In the last few years,there has been a deepening in India of the state and peoples appreciation of the need to hasten inclusive education. By inducting private and unaided schools in this effort,and not placing the onus only on government-funded or -assisted schools,the legislation has the potential to address issues larger than just the provision of education for all.

The bill provides children in the six-to-fourteen age group with the right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school. This obviously includes government schools. But in a departure of public policy towards school vouchers,it entitles certain disadvantaged and weaker groups to 25 per cent of seats in government-aided including Kendriya Vidyalayas and unaided that is,private schools. Unaided schools will be reimbursed an amount equal to their tuition fee or the per-capita student expenditure in government schools,whichever is lower. The success of the programme will be in the detail: how accountable will the referral authority be,how large-hearted schools can be in averting differentiation in their classes,how inventive orientation programmes for lateral admission will be,how incidentals will be funded. But for a society as desperate to break the perpetuation of class stratification as India should be,this shift towards what amounts to a common school system is welcome. It begins to set right the pyramid in affirmative action programmes,in making more equal the opportunities any Indian has to make good on the strength of her education. Any number of case studies has shown that quotas in higher education have less than optimum outcomes because of the inequalities left unaddressed at the lower education stage.

It is therefore important the implementation be as transparent as can be. Policy must be clear on the mechanism by which students will be picked for certain schools,so that local patronage and corruption chains do not develop. And even as the right to education is operationalised at the earliest,there must be keen monitoring of enrolments and some checks of standards. This is because,for the first time,by policy,the wall of separation between state and private schools has been breached. Delivery and regulatory mechanisms in this uncharted area must be refined based on real-time experience.