Opinion Express view on No Detention Policy: Scrapping it will aggravate problems

The words, elimination and examination, are almost always intertwined, especially in India, where examinations are primarily elimination tests. The Right to Education Act, 2009, underlined a different approach. It scraped out the humiliation of elimination from the body politic of examination. It came out with the No Detention Policy (NDP) for students up to Class VIII. That was innovative in a country where success is often measured in terms of examination scores.

After 15 years, much of the radical approach has been diluted. From the next academic year, Class V and Class VIII students in government schools will be held back or eliminated according to their performance. The move is an extension of the amendment introduced by the Centre to the RTE in 2019, when it left the issue of detention to the discretion of state governments. NDP was premised on the theory that detention led to school dropouts. The RTE was passed when the dropout rate for students between Classes I to VIII was 42.5 per cent. Notably, for the SCs and STs, the percentage was much higher — 51.2 and 56.8, respectively. In 2024, as the central government annuls the NDP, the dropout rate has already come down to 12.6 per cent, according to the latest data from UDISE. If the decreasing dropout rate stands in favour of NDP, a 2023 report by ASER, which showed that only a fourth of the enrolled students in the age group of 14 to 18 can fluently read a Class II-level text, vouches for the contrary.

Advertisement

However, the RTE was not all about NDP. It was envisioned that the students who failed to pass the exams would be given “special care” by teachers to achieve the required level of learning. But do the teachers have enough infrastructure to take “special care”? The overburdened teachers in primary and secondary schools rarely have time to even look into the students’ basic needs. According to the reports of the Ministry of Education, the government schools, both at the primary and elementary levels, are grappling with a shortage of 8.4 lakh teachers. Responding to a question in the Rajya Sabha in the just-concluded Winter Session, Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Jayant Chowdhury, cited a few reasons for dropout, including students’ lack of interest and their inability to “cope up with studies”. Will detention not aggravate the problem? It is bound to affect the interest of the students, mostly of those who belong to marginalised communities. The imagination of innovative education and universal access, as proposed by the National Education Policy (NEP), doesn’t go with the narrative of elimination/detention.