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In 1915 in a village named Ooruttambalam in Kerala,the great Dalit revolutionary Ayyankali took a Pulaya untouchable girl for admission into a Malayalam school.

March 24, 2010 02:38 AM IST First published on: Mar 24, 2010 at 02:38 AM IST

In 1915 in a village named Ooruttambalam in Kerala,the great Dalit revolutionary Ayyankali took a Pulaya untouchable girl for admission into a Malayalam school. The upper castes set fire to the school to prevent the untouchable children from defiling the educational institution. This was followed by the first-ever agricultural strike in the history of the nation,fought not for wages but for school admission. After nearly a 100 years (and 60 years of the Indian republic),education and admission will be as inaccessible as for the little Pulaya girl. This time,the question is not about the right to entry,but the cost of education.

As a nation,we know the travails of educating the children of Dalits,adivasis,marginal farmers and toiling industrial workers. But the rich in our country never had this problem. Even the salaried middle class could look up to low-fee high-quality institutions built by the government to educate their children. If the HRD ministers dream comes true,the entire middle class will become debt-ridden to eager private banks and dormant nationalised banks. In 10 years,there will be no difference between the farmers of Vidarbha and the English-educated salaried middle class.

One can imagine the plight of parents who took loans to send their children to Australia,and their consequent troubles. Education,once almost free,has now become a costly,globalised and privatised commodity. The UPA was visibly under-committed to implementing the 95th amendment made to the Constitution by inserting Article 15 (5) to make education accessible to Dalits,adivasis and the backwards. The amendment envisaged reservation in all government,aided or unaided private educational institution. But with UPA-II,one only hears of liberating education from the clutches of the government,revamping higher education etc. because education is a saleable commodity.

The second indication of things to come is the pricing of application forms. The price of a mere form is never less than Rs 500 in private and sometimes even in government-run institutions. How can a student whose family falls under the poverty line (less than Rs 20 a day as per the Arjun Sengupta report),afford one? Will the whole family go hungry to buy one application form?

The right to education humbug,unfortunately,is restricted to government institutions. The poor will not have right of entry into elite public schools the government is not willing to pay the high fees,and nor are the schools willing to accept poor children. So by 2015,again we will have a poor Pulaya girl waiting outside a public school.

The Union HRD minister has brought in the Educational Tribunal Bill which deals with any dispute arising between students and institutions,teachers and institutions and the institutions concerned with any regulatory body. That means there will be more work for the lawyers in our country.

Next comes the Foreign Education Providers Bill which will allow a foreign institution to operate in our country and probably charge tuitions in dollars or euros,and push our foreign-education-crazy middle class to run around banks (and money lenders) to cough up the cash. The UPA is also bringing in a bill on accreditation to allow the entry of private accrediting agencies into the country,both foreign and local,to rank private educational institutions and star them from one to five. Instead of expanding and increasing the reach of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) which is the premier and highly authentic institution established by the University Grants Commission,headed by highly respected academics like Prof. Goverdhan Mehta and Prof. H.A. Ranganath,the government has chosen to open this country to roadside shops to award accreditation to our business-minded private educational institutions.

Again the lawyers in our country will find their plates full because the government is coming up with another bill,purportedly to contain capitation fee,but actually designed to impute criminality to teachers through the Prohibition of Unfair Practice in Technical,Medical,Educational Institutions and Universities Bill. This bill will allow the police to enter educational institutions on one or the other pretext,the slightest violation or even false information about the facilities and faculty. Upon violation of any of the 25 listed violations,the Central government (usurping the states governments role) can fine up to Rs 50 lakh or sentence the teacher up to 10 years. This is not to defend errant insititutions,but whether such actions warrant the imputation of criminality is the basic question that Parliament must ponder. After all,education is a field for learning,not for litigation.

It is an entirely different issue that the HRD minister and the UPA are least bothered about the rights of state governments to run educational institutions,and regulate them in the interest of linguistic culture and integrity. There will be a day when the nation will have to rue the Centres unwarranted entry into the states domain and the imposition of the HRD ministrys whims,to cow down,control,regulate,access,accredit,implicate in criminal cases, the education sector in the state governments.

UPA -II is now creating another SEZ special education zones which will lead to a further divide between the haves and have-nots in a country where education is already the primary basis for the gulf between the rich and poor,the rural and the urban.

The writer is CPI national secretary and a Rajya Sabha MP.