Right to Education Legislation

Comparisons with Kothari Commission’s Common School formulations

Vinod Raina

With the Lok Sabha passing the Right to Education Bill on August 4, 2009, education is finally a fundamental Right of children between ages 6 to 14. Having received the President’s assent, the Bill is soon going to be notified as an Act. This will make the controversial 86th amendment of the Constitution, which inserted the Right to Education under Article 21A in 2002, operative. Since a CABE committee was set up in 2004 to draft the Bill, it has taken five years of struggle, during which time the Bill was abandoned as a central legislation in favour of respective states bringing in their own legislations based on a toothless model Bill, to resurrect it and get it passed.

That should bring to rest the current phase of advocacy and campaigning for the Bill. The task must be to ensure its proper implementation now. But because of some glaring shortcomings of the Bill, like the definition of the child, campaigns for amending the Act, including through the judicial process, to bring in the 0-6 and 14-18 age groups must simultaneously continue, since 0-18 is the internationally agreed definition of the child as per the United Nations Convention of Child Rights to which India is a signatory, and 0-6 was constitutionally mandated by the original Article 45 of the Directive Principles, and reconfirmed by the Supreme Court in 1993 through the Unnikrishnan judgment. Though the Bill has some restraining components for private schools, the campaign to reinsert the clause on a complete regulation of private schools that was dropped from the final draft must also go on, in order to stop the reckless and unregulated charging of fees and questionable notions of quality being practiced by many of these schools.

A view however prevails that the Bill is unacceptable since it should have completely done away with private schools; some commentators even claiming that the Bill shall ‘promote’ privatization. As a recent example, in an opinion piece in the Hindu of August 11, 2009, the former vice-chairman of the National Knowledge Commission and a well- respected scientist, Prof. P.M. Bhargava states that “the Right to Education Bill … passed by the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha, if notified by the government, will only be a boon for those who make money in the school business, while it will be a disaster for those who have no access to education today. Unfortunately, that is what the rich and the ruling classes want”. The statement imputes that there is nothing in the Bill that would help improve the governmental school system, and has no provisions that would curb certain undesirable practices of private schools. As will be discussed later, both the assertions are factually incorrect. It would appear that the sole concern of certain critics is that the Bill should have, by taking away the right to charge fees, sounded the death knell of private schools; anything else, like improvement of government schools is too little, rendering the Bill unacceptable. While agreeing with the spirit that no one should be allowed to make profit from the education of children who have been provided a fundamental right to free education, it would be desirable to examine whether

1 transforming such a spirit into law is realistic, politically and constitutionally, in the present times or, whether that was possible even in the past when privatization of education was much less rampant, like when the landmark and progressive Kothari Commission Report was prepared.

Common Schools

Ever since the CABE committee began its work in 2004 to draft the Right to Education Bill, legitimate concerns have been expressed as to the extent to which the proposed law would foster education that would promote equality and social integration across class, caste and gender schisms. The concern stems from the ground reality that Indian education has diversified and differentiated along caste, class and religious lines in a manner that can only further exacerbate these faults, rather than help narrow them.

The explosion of unaided and unregulated commercial schools, the further dilution of the already poor quality run-in –the-mill government schools through the DPEP and SSA schemes; that promote cheap Education Guarantee Centers, alternative schools and so on, along with unqualified temporary para-teachers have seriously widened the class and caste fault lines in schooling, pushing them into a runaway spiral. It has been the hope and demand of many that the proposed law should check this runaway phenomenon.

Such hope and demand is almost invariably located in the Education Commission Report of 1966, popularly called the Kothari Commission Report (KCR), as is Prof. Bhargava’s contention too in his Hindu article: “To be truly independent as a nation, and to maintain national dignity, India needs a knowledge society in which every citizen has a minimum amount of knowledge. The country can do that only by decommercialising and decommodifying education and setting up a common school system (for which there has been a continuous demand since the days of the Kothari Commission in the early-1960s) in which the students of the rich and the poor in the same neighbourhood would be studying in the same school without paying any fees, and with a new curricular framework”. As we shall discuss later, the premise of this hope is actually unfounded since the Kothari Commission concluded that private schools will have to be excluded from the common school system. The die-hard proponents of the Common School system however recently went to the extent of rejecting the Right to Education Bill, demanding from the Lok Sabha speaker Ms. Meira Kumar that it be withheld from being introduced in the Lok Sabha until it was brought in conformity with the Common School system of public education as delineated in the Kothari Commission Report. The kernel of their argument seems to be that the national system of education of KCR with its Common Schools imposes restrictions on the Government to have different ‘quality’ schools – of the Kendriya, Navodaya, Sarvodaya type, and more importantly, it curbs the right of private unaided schools to charge fees since they will have to become part of the common neighbourhood schools to provide free education to all children in the 6-14 age group. It is however not clear from the forceful submissions of such opponents to the RtE legislation whether they are really aware of the full contents of the Kothari Commission Report, or whether they choose to be selective in their use of the contents of the Report.

2 Where as there can be no dispute regarding the need to move towards a more equal and egalitarian system of education, the limitations that even the much acclaimed Kothari Commission Report imposes on such an objective needs some reflection. One must keep in mind that the market forces were at best subdued in 1966 when the Report came out, and yet the Report accepted constitutional constraints while dealing with private schools. If this Report, acclaimed for its stress on egalitarianism could not undo the specter of privatization in times when the nationalist ethos still prevailed, what are the political chances of doing so in 2009, when even the draft approach paper of the Planning Commission wanted the voucher system to be adopted for school education during the 11th plan period?

Kothari Commission formulations

The concept of Common Schools can be found at a number of places in the Report of the Kothari Commission. The vision of the national system of education that incorporates Common Schools is eloquently elaborated in the well-known section 1.36 of the report, too long to produce here in full. A summary can however be found at section 1.38:

If……the educational system is to become a powerful instrument of national development in general, and social and national integration in particular, we must move towards the goal of a common school system of public education - which will be open to all children, irrespective of caste, creed, community, religion, economic conditions or social status; - where access to good education will depend not on wealth or class but on talent; - which will maintain adequate standards in all schools and provide at least a reasonable proportion of quality institutions; - in which no tuition fees will be charged; and - which would meet the needs of the average parent so that he would not ordinarily feel the need to send his children to expensive schools outside the system.

The invocation of the term ‘talent’ instead of ‘right’, and the uninhibited reference to the provision of a ‘reasonable proportion of quality institutions’ demand particular attention. Such a provision of quality institutions is quantified further in section 10.02

A nation-wide programme of school improvement should be organized with three objectives: (a) to raise all schools to at least to a minimum prescribed level; (b) to assist every school to rise to the highest level of which it is capable; and (c) during the next ten years, to raise at least ten percent of the institutions to an optimum standard.

Clearly, the KCR foresees that only a small proportion of schools, ten per cent, could be raised to ‘optimum standards’, implying that there would exist a difference in the quality of the bulk of the schools (to be raised to a minimum prescribed level) and a small proportion of quality schools, at least for a decade or more. In section 10.31, the Report clearly suggests a classification of schools into three categories, A, B and C based on their quality; something that would seem to dilute, or even negate, the concept of a

3 common school. The differentiation of schools is however made unambiguously explicit in section 10.31 thus:

It will not be possible for lack of resources to raise all schools to a high level within a short period. The strategy to be adopted for development should therefore be on the following lines:

1. highest priority in the programme should be given to the creation of minimum proportion of ‘quality’ schools at every stage which would serve as pace setting institutions……It is necessary to concentrate available resources in a few centers for primary schools – 10% quality schools for secondary – one in each block.

4. at the higher primary and secondary stages, admissions to these (quality) schools should be regulated on the basis of merit to ensure that the brighter children from all strata of society receive the best education possible.

This is in fact one of the most problematic recommendations of the entire Report. Contrary to popular notions, not only does it grant legitimacy to Kendriya, Navodaya, Sarvodaya and other ‘quality’ schools of the Government, even anticipating Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh’s announcement of 6000 quality schools, one in each block; it further restricts admission to them on the basis of merit, thus opening the Pandora’s box of admission tests and other screening procedures within the governmental school system.

The lack of urgency in implementing the common school system and tentativeness in the proposal asking for a pilot phase contingent on the approval of the concerned people can be found at section 10.19:

We are of the view that the neighbourhood school concept should be adopted as a long – term goal, to be reached in a well planned programme spread over 20 years. The strategy for its adoption should be as follows:

- During the next ten years, two programmes should be pursued side by side. The first is to improve all primary schools to a minimum level prescribed and to raise about ten per cent of them to a higher standard of quality.

- Simultaneously, the neighbourhood school system should be introduced at the lower primary stage, as a pilot project, in a few areas where public opinion is favourable to the acceptance of the proposal.

Private Schools

While these are a sample of provisions for the government school system, what about the private unaided schools, which are termed as ‘independent’ schools in the Report? Again, contrary to the popular notion that the Report recommends them to be a part of

4 the common school system, it first recognizes their constitutional validity (in section 10.77), and then goes on to exclude them from the national system of public education (common schools) in the following manner:

“The right to establish private schools for any purpose whatsoever has also been given to all citizens under clauses (c) and (g) of Article 19 which provide that all citizens shall have the right ‘to form associations’ and to ‘practice any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business’ and which obviously covers the right of individuals and groups to establish and conduct educational institutions of their choice. Private schools may, therefore, be established under the provisions of the Constitution and, if they do not seek aid or recognition from the State, they will have to be treated as being outside the national system of public education.”

The exclusion of private schools from common schooling and the national system of public education is further reiterated in the following explicit insertion in the Summary of Chapter 10 of the Report:

The Common School System of Public Education would include all government schools, all local authority schools and all aided private schools. Only two types of schools will remain outside it – independent (private) schools and unrecognized schools.

No wonder that the Government of India accepted the recommendations with the following summary of this portion of the Report:

To promote social cohesion and national integration the Common School system as recommended by the Education Commission should be adopted. Efforts should be made to improve the standard of education in general schools. All special schools like Public Schools should be required to admit students on the basis of merit and also to provide a prescribed proportion of free-studentships to prevent segregation of social classes. This will not however affect the rights of minorities under Article 30 of the Constitution. (4b, “The Resolution issued by the Government of India on the Report of the Education Commission”)

Notice the use of the term ‘special schools’ and ‘Public Schools’ (a term inherited from the Britishers for private schools) as special category schools where the Common School system would not apply, but which would be obliged to admit students in a prescribed proportion of free studentships. Elsewhere in the Report, it has been suggested that the Government should spend on these freeships, in the form of scholarships to students who are picked up on merit for these special category schools (section 10.31). Notice also that minority institutions have also been made exempt from the common school system, where as the Right to Education legislation does not exempt them from any of its provisions, including the 25% neighbourhood quota.

The Report even goes to the extent of eulogizing the private schools (section 10.12) and sees their role as ‘seed farms’ in quality improvement:

5 The good private schools which maintain high standards and which have been able to attract the services of dedicated and competent teachers will have to be identified and given more freedom and adequate financial assistance. These institutions even today are the quality schools in the system and set the pace for others. They can quickly and effectively be developed as the ‘seed farms’ in the common school system of public education.

The Right to Education Bill

We may now compare some of the key provisions of the Right to Education Bill with the recommendations of the Kothari Commission Report in order to arrive at somewhat rational conclusions regarding the supposed deviations of the Bill from the Report.

Like the KCR, the draft bill recognizes four categories of schools – governmental (either under departments of education or local authorities), private but aided by the government, private unaided, and special category schools of the government – the Kendriya, Navodaya etc (called ‘quality’ schools in the KCR).

The Bill asks for the establishment of a neighbourhood government school within three years from the time of enactment of the Act; for free education to every 6 to 14 year old in the entire country. The Kothari Commission Report recommended experimenting with it in a few places, with the consent of the local people. The Bill obliges aided-private schools to admit children for free admission proportional to the aid they receive, the minimum being 25%. This means if a school receives 70% of its funds from the Government, it will have to admit 70% children from its neighbourhood for free education, and will receive no further grants for these children from the state. As for private schools, minority schools and special category schools, instead of scholarships and freeships from government funds to meritorious students, the Bill obliges the schools to admit 25% children from the neighbourhood from disadvantaged sections, without assessing their merit or submitting them to admission tests; with the provision that the school shall be reimbursed for this proportion of children by the state at the state’s per child cost, or the school cost, which ever is less.

Unlike the KCR, the Bill does not exclude the independent, minority and special category schools but brings them into the ambit of neighbourhood schools, at a proportionate responsibility; completely doing away with the mention of ‘merit’, ‘talent’ scholarships, freeships and the consequent screening procedures. Is this an improvement or dilution from the KCR? It is however weird that the same advocates of common schools criticize this provision of mixing the advantaged and disadvantaged children and, see it as a promotion of privatization. The idea behind this provision is not to pass on the state’s responsibility to the private schools to the extent of 25%. It is to prescribe legally the mixing together of different sections of children, which might pedagogically actually be advantageous to the ‘elite’ children, since the long interaction with children of India that are normally invisible to them can sensitize them to India that is Bharat (as is the experience with one such experiment at Lorreto, Sealdah, pioneered by Sister Cyril). As

6 for payment for these children, Article 21A binds the state to provide free education, not the private or community. If these 25% children were not going to the neighbourhood private schools, the state would anyway have had to provide schooling for them at its own per learner cost, which is what it will reimburse to the private school. How can that be termed as promoting privatization? Kothari Commission said that children of merit should be sent to these schools on scholarships and freeships paid by the state – that would imply the Kothari Commission was also promoting privatization! And if it is a measure aimed at promoting privatization, why on earth would the private school lobbies, with their advocates like the CII and their moles in the government fight so hard to have this clause removed ever since it was leaked to the press during the drafting stage in 2005? One of the toughest fights for the Bill has been to retain this clause against an all out opposition by the private lobbies; do the critics claim to understand the ‘private’ interests better than the private lobbies?

Regarding the over all improvement of quality, the KCR mentions ‘The first is to improve all primary schools to a minimum level prescribed’. The Bill through a mandatory infrastructural and Pupil Teacher Ratio schedule prescribes the minimum standards without which no school, governmental, aided or private shall be allowed to operate. This includes number of classrooms, teaching hours, library, teaching materials, separate toilets for girls and boys, drinking water, playground, and a PTR ratio that will be maintained in each school and not as an average over a block or district. It prescribes the qualifications of teachers to be determined by an academic authority at the center, to bring in uniformity in the quality of teachers for the whole country, and delineates their academic responsibilities; in both state and private schools, and prescribes that their emoluments be commensurate with these qualifications. These provisions should completely outlaw the EGS centers, para-teachers and other similar distortions brought about by the DPEP and continued through the SSA. Unregulated private schools (shops) that lack such norms and standards and qualified teachers will either have to invest heavily to attain these norms and seek recognition, or will have to close down. The Bill prescribes principles that shall determine the quality of the content and process, which include activity based and child centered pedagogies, a no detention policy accompanied by continuous and comprehensive evaluation that does away with the stigma of failure imposed on children. It bans private tuitions by teachers, physical punishment and mental harassment of children, calling for education to be free from fear, trauma and anxiety to the children. It does not prescribe any punishment for parents; squarely defining ‘compulsory’ as compulsion on the state to provide. It defines ‘free’ to mean freedom from all financial barriers that prevent a child from participating in school, and not merely non-payment of fees (which is what the KCR says). It bars schools from refusing admission for the lack of a transfer or birth certificate, a crucial provision in the case of poor and migrant children. Are these elements of inclusiveness and quality deviations or improvements over the Kothari Commission recommendations? The basis for the viewpoint that the legislation ‘will only be a boon for those who make money in the school business, while it will be a disaster for those who have no access to education today’ is therefore completely unclear – considering access to a neighbourhood school of a defined quality within three years is now the right of every child under this legislation.

7 The question of values school education should promote has been a serious issue, evident from the saffronization debates. Progressive elements have constantly voiced the need for some form of legal regulation for prescribing curriculum and syllabus and for text book writing to curb such distortions. There has been a general consensus that values of democracy and debate, secularism, cooperation and so on, enshrined in our constitution, must be the guiding values in educational transaction. The Bill explicitly prescribes that the curriculum, content and process must be in conformity with the constitutional values of India.

Another point of contention are non-academic tasks of teachers. The draft retains elections, decennial census and disaster management as tasks to which teachers could be assigned (not shall be assigned), banning everything else. There is naturally disquiet about it. Unfortunately, it flows from Constitutional provisions that prescribe that any government servant can be called on to undertake these tasks (as IAS officers too have to be released for election duties). The following extract from a note from the Election Commission should make that clear:

Article 324(6) of the Constitution of India read with Section 159 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 makes it obligatory that the President (the Government of India), or the Governor (the Government of any state) as well as every local authority shall, when so requested by the Election Commission, make available to the Election Commission or to a regional Commissioner or to the Chief Electoral Officer or the Returning Officer, as the case may be, such staff as may be necessary for the performance of any duties in connection with an election.

In ELECTION COMMISSION OF INDIA, vs. STATE BANK OF INDIA, the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that the services of those government servants who are appointed to public services and posts under the Central or State Governments as well as those who are employees of the local authorities will have to be made available for the purpose of election and any such government servant or employee of the local authority who shall defy the requisition, may receive suitable punishment.

An Act can not be in violation of any of the existing provisions of the Constitution. If the Bill explicitly said that school teachers can not be assigned to elections, this would violate the existing Article 324(6) of the Constitution. Freeing teachers from such duties would therefore require an amendment of Article 324(6), as would banning private schools require amending Article 19 (c) and (g) of the Constitution.

Debates and Actions

These few comparisons should suffice for now. The fact is that many people have not read the Report at all or carefully, and carry hearsay impressions. The problem of internal inconsistency is not unique to the Kothari Commission Report – ambivalence and tentativeness in progressive formulations is the hall mark of most educational reports; worse, different sections tend to contradict each other (that is why one needs to go beyond the oft referred section 1.36 on common schooling of the KCR).

8 Why is this so? That is the big political question. The bourgeoisie Indian nation-state was carved out and is structured as a sum of contested vested interests, needs, aspirations, and political clouts, which are reflected in its body-politic. Public policy, in any sphere, therefore ends up as a ‘please-all’ effort; unable to escape ambivalence, tentativeness and contradiction. A Bill or a Parliamentary report is finally a political rather than an educational (domain) document, and will more often reflect the contested politics rather than progressive logic. So however logical an argument of public policy might seem, if it lacks political backing, it is unlikely to go forward. As many political commentators have pointed out, the problem is not an inability to draft sensible formulations in the area of public policy; it is in the structure of the Indian nation-state; where democracy more often gets defined as accommodating contradictory viewpoints rather than arriving at a coherent and logical structure. The Kothari Commission report or the RtE Bill is equally under stress from such political contradictions.

It is not as if social movements are immune from such contestations. Take language for example. Global educational research supports the view, inherent also to the national system of education of the KCR, that mother tongue as medium of instruction in formative years is not only essential for a learning mind, but also greatly aids the acquisition of proficiency in the second language later on. It must therefore be reflected in any policy. However, one can not summararily dismiss a counter view coming out of dalit politics. Beginning with Ambedkar, various dalit thinkers and movements have opposed such stress on the mother tongue or Hindi, maintaining that dalit emancipation is linked to freedom from the caste dominating local languages; insisting therefore that in order to bring in the ‘liberative’ influence of English language it should be taught from the very beginning of children’s education. This is a contestation that will have to be negotiated with patience and democratic debate. That a certain ‘global’ elite in India might also think English is important, for entirely different reasons, is an added complication that needs to be factored in. These intricate debates can not be resolved by taking isolationist radical sounding positions, which might contribute to individualized radical image making but are unlikely to help improve the education of children, which must remain the primary objective.

The extent to which such politics can be influenced by academicians and social activists has obvious limitations; individualized rhetoric is particularly less effective compared to organized resistance of large masses and organizations. Which is not to imply that we remain away from such actions; it is just that we need to be humble in assessing our interventionist strengths. In this context, the demand that the Bill be stopped till the 86th Amendment is re-amended is especially politically unrealistic. True that the 86th Amendment is retrograde, that it is two-steps backward compared to the Unnikrishnan judgment; that the age of the child should be from 0 to 18 rather than 6 to 14. However, what do we expect from a government that relegated the Bill to a model bill for the states to bring in, whose High Level Group concluded that it was too expensive to legislate, whose Planning Commission attempted to remove anything to do with private schools and sought to introduce the voucher scheme, and the Law Department tried to remove all sections dealing with quality? The government is not acting in a neo-liberal manner, it is

9 neo-liberal. That such attempts were actually thwarted is quite surprising and indicate the considerable success of public pressure; but one has to be equally realistic about the limits of such pressure on the existing political system.

The issue of common schooling and inclusive education is important not only because of what the Kothari Commission Report says or does not say – it is important by itself. Locating within the KCR has an advantage since it provides a legitimate policy framework, but that comes with a contradictory baggage too, which can not be hidden. If the Indian political system, particularly the liberal, left, democratic, and socialist parties are not willing to come together for such inclusiveness, a Bill espousing such causes has little chance of going through the Parliament now, or, as the opponents to the introduction of the Bill seem to suggest, later. That the parties did not press for these changes in the Parliamentary Standing Committee or on the floor of the house defines their real position; public speeches by party members at non-parliamentary forums ought not to be confused with party positions. That the Speaker of Lok Sabha ignored the petition of some people to stop the Bill from being debated in the House, and the President too ignored petitions to return the Bill since it was allegedly ‘unconstitutional’ provides enough evidence how the political and constitutional system views the objections raised in the various petitions.

One can of course end up in a situation like the Bihar government has. With a fair deal of publicity and good intentions, it formulated a Policy on Common Schooling, which reads fairly progressive. The sad sequel is the Bihar government’s quiet decision to shelve the policy as unimplementable (conversation with the Bihar CM and Principal Secretary, Education at the Education Convention in Patna on January 26, 2008). The writers may use it as good reference material, but have the children benefited from it? Do we want to be crusaders for the ‘perfect’, accepting nothing else – and if that crusade takes another 50 to 100 years, having already taken 62 years since independence, does it indicate our concern for the 20 crore children in the 6-14 age group today? Even the much acclaimed NREGA is anything but perfect. One could criticize it for providing work for just 100 days rather than 200 as was the demand of social movements, excluding the urban poor, providing at best some temporary ‘relief’ from poverty, without tackling the basic issue of rural poverty which is inextricably linked to the most serious forms of privatization – of capital and land. Should we oppose it too and demand that it be kept in abeyance till land reforms are complete? Or does it make sense to welcome it while trying to improve its provisions and the larger fight for land reforms continues. Up to class 8, around 80% children are in government schools, the rest in private – aided and unaided. Should we postpone the provisions of the present legislation for the 80% and certain regulations for the 20% - if read and interpreted properly they are anything but insubstantial or crumbs, as some critics tend to dismiss them – till we resolve the constitutional validity of the existence of private schools; something the Kothari Commission could not resolve? We could either try to outlaw private schools, or we could try and make every neighbourhood government school of such a quality (as the government run Kendriya Vidyalayas are to some extent) that parents choose to send their children there rather than to a private school. That is how educationally advanced countries have ensured that children go to neighbourhood state schools, not by outlawing private schools, but by making the state schools as good or better, and free.

10 After campaigning relentlessly, as part of the People’s Science Movement, from numerous public forums all over the country at state, district and even sub-district levels, involving teacher organizations, student and youth groups, social movements and general public; with nearly all political parties, and the bureaucratic system, if this sounds like a viewpoint emanating from political pragmatism, well it is. It is time now to ensure, wholeheartedly, the proper implementation of the legislation so that around 20 crore children in the 6 to 14 age group benefit; while continuing the fight to bring relevant amendments to the legislation so that various improvements can be made, like that the benefits accrue to all children, from birth to 18 years of age; private schools are properly regulated, the mandatory schedule of norms and standards of a school is improved every few years, there is no multi grade teaching and so on.

One hopes that the critics will rethink their strategy now. Some of them appear greatly agitated by what they see as constitutional flaws in the legislation. With a great deal of finality, for example, V. P. Niranjanaradhya asserts in his article in the The Hindu of August 30, 2009 that the ‘bill passed in the Lok Sabha on August 4, 2009 is ultra vires and unconstitutional’, demanding that the ‘honourable President of India, being a custodian of the Constitution should return the Bill back to the Parliament’. A similar petition had been given to the Lok Sabha speaker prior to the introduction of the Bill in the Lok Sabha, as also to the President by other people. Having given her assent to the Bill, it is clear that the President has not seen merit in arguments made either by Niranjanaradhya or the petition before her, just as the Lok Sabha speaker had not seen merit in the earlier petitions. The implications are clear: either the arguments and interpretations offered by the critics and petitioners are unsatisfactory or flawed, or the two supreme constitutional heads have acted in violation of their constitutional responsibilities. The critics will have to take a call on this. If they are convinced of their arguments, they must take the issue to the final and binding interpreter of the constitution in this country, namely the Supreme Court. However, if they are unwilling to challenge the rulings of the Lok Sabha speaker and the President in the Supreme Court, they have the responsibility to reconsider their objections and clarify to the general public on the same, since a large number of people’s organizations working in education, who wish to get involved in some way or the other in the proper implementation of the Right to Education legislation, as compared to those for whom it is an academic public issue since they have little to do with actual implementation, have been fairly confused by the strident calls for the rejection of the legislation.

Sep 2, 2009

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