AMONG THE FUNDAMENTAL rights that citizens enjoy under the Constitution, perhaps the most difficult to assert is the right to free and compulsory school education. Children aged six to 14 have the right to such an education under Article 21A, a guarantee created in the wake of the Supreme Court's judgment in J.P. Unnikrishnan vs State of Andhra Pradesh. Not much progress has, however, been made in achieving universal elementary education since the amended statute became effective in December 2002. On the contrary, educationists are deeply worried that state policy has embarked on a course that seeks to offer not the robust mainstream education that is available to the more affluent population, but weak alternatives that can be passed off as schooling for the underprivileged, for girl children, and the disabled. The vehicle for these alternative parallel education streams is the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) or Education for All scheme that has won plaudits from lending agencies like the World Bank but failed to carry conviction with many development advocates. Laudable as its goals appear to be, the SSA vision is largely limited to enabling children of the relevant age group to attend Education Guarantee Centres or Alternate Schools and complete eight years of what can, at best, be called an untested pattern of para-schooling.

The announcement that the SSA will be getting soft credit support of $500 million from the World Bank to meet part of the total scheme cost of $3.5 billion may therefore not receive an uncritical welcome. Even if the irony of a "shining" India opting to borrow so heavily to provide some form of basic education to its children were to be ignored, the policy shift away from state responsibility to fund free and compulsory mainstream education of the kind envisaged by the Constitution cannot go unnoticed. The Tapas Majumdar Committee constituted in 1999 estimated that an investment of just 78 paise for every Rs.100 of GDP could fund plans for all out-of-school children to be brought into the system over a 10-year period. An even lower level of state support could have achieved the goal, considering that the Centre whittled down Operation Blackboard norms on the teacher-student ratio and the number of teachers and classrooms per primary school.

Compulsory and free enrolment of children as envisaged by Article 21A is central to the success of any policy that seeks to universalise elementary education. In the public space, the interpretation of compulsion has mostly dwelt on fear of harassment of parents. There is some substance to this, as some States that failed to address the problems of weak infrastructure and absence of incentives have actually experimented with laws that seek to punish parents who do not send their children to school. Economists such as Jean Dreze have pointed out that this is a narrow view of compulsory education; the compulsion is really on the state to provide adequate facilities to all children, with a concomitant obligation on parents to send their children to school. Such a balanced perspective would serve the cause of disadvantaged groups such as girls in indigent and needy families who are deprived of education owing to community pressures and child labourers whose parents have no welfare alternatives to compensate for the loss of their earnings. The social priorities identified by the 86th Amendment Act to the Constitution (which introduced Article 21A) are now being re-evaluated against the backdrop of the SSA programme. It is an opportune moment to reinstate in education policy the principles of equality and assured quality through higher outlays in the budget.

link to the editorial on The Hindu site

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