Right to Education:

      Education is a fundamental human right and essential for the exercise of all other human rights. It promotes individual freedom and empowerment and yields important development benefits. Yet millions of children and adults remain deprived of educational opportunities, many as a result of poverty.

     Normative instruments of the United Nations and UNESCO lay down international legal obligations for the right to education. These instruments promote and develop the right of every person to enjoy access to education of good quality, without discrimination or exclusion. These instruments bear witness to the great importance that Member States and the international community attach to normative action for realizing the right to education. It is for governments to fulfill their obligations both legal and political in regard to providing education for all of good quality and to implement and monitor more effectively education strategies.

       Education is a powerful tool by which economically and socially marginalized adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty and participate fully as citizens.

       India is home to 19% of the world’s Children. What this means is that India has the world’s largest number of youngsters, which is largely beneficial, especially as compared to countries like China, which has an aging population. The not-so-good news is that India also has one-third of the world’s illiterate population. It’s not as though literacy levels have not increased, but rather that the rate of the increase is rapidly slowing. For example, while total literacy growth from 1991 to 2001 was 12.6%, it has declined to 9.21%. To combat this worrisome trend, the Indian government proposed the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, making education a fundamental right of every child in the age group of 6 to 14. 

       The right to education is a universal entitlement to education. This is recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as a human right that includes the right to free, compulsory primary education for all, an obligation to develop secondary education accessible to all, in particular by the progressive introduction of free secondary education, as well as an obligation to develop equitable access to higher education, ideally by the progressive introduction of free higher education.

        The right to education also includes a responsibility to provide basic education for individuals who have not completed primary education. In addition to these access to education provisions, the right to education encompasses the obligation to rule out discrimination at all levels of the educational system, to set minimum standards and to improve the quality of education.

  International Recognition of Education as a Human Right

       There are many human rights problems, which cannot be solved unless the right to education is addressed as the key to unlock other human rights. The right to education is clearly acknowledged in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948, which states:

      “Everyone has the right to education. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit…” (Article 26)

     Apart from UDHR, right to education is affirmed, protected and promoted in numerous international human rights treaties, such as the following:

• Convention concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation (1958) - Article 3
• Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960)
• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) - Article 13
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1981) –Article 10
• The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) – Article 28 & 29

    The prominent organizations around the world striving for promotion of Right to Education are:

1.   United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
2.   United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
3.   World Bank
4.   International Labor Organization 

   Right to Education in India: Implications and Challenges

      The enactment of the fundamental right to education, still in Parliamentary process but widely expected to become reality soon, is ambitious for a country that has witnessed decades of policy failure to make operational the rhetoric of free and compulsory elementary education for all children until the age of 14. Education has been neither free nor compulsory. For the state to guarantee education provision through a legislative enactment is a major shift, given a history of provision which has consistently failed disadvantaged groups, privileging the interests of a minority urban elite. About 110 million children remain out of the schooling system, and about 60% of those who enroll in school drop out by grade 8 (2001). As studies have consistently shown over time, those excluded continue to reflect inequalities within the wider social, economic and political fabric, particularly those of caste, class, and gender. Axes of inclusion are broadly predicted around the following occupational and social classifications – children of the upper castes or from smaller families, or from households that are economically better off or dependent on non-agricultural occupations, with parents who are better educated, or from villages that have better access to schools – thus underlining the roles played by social position, economic opportunity and the power exercised by local community leadership in securing state provided resources in education. Cutting right across these axes is the gender gap, which is more or less consistent across social groups.

      The gap between discourse and operational framework in all policy efforts in education, and more widely development, has long been cited as a reason for India’s poor performance in securing equitable educational opportunity for all. Despite a range of commitments made in the Indian Constitution to equality, addressing the historical disadvantage faced by certain groups, and universal education, policies on the ground have done little to fulfil the ambitious vision developed at the birth of the modern Indian nation-state. This gap appears in danger of persisting, even with the shift to guaranteeing the right to education. In this section, some issues raised by the current approach are explored.

    Space and Place for Claiming the Right to Education

         The ‘right’ to education provides a framework for accepting that basic education is an entitlement of each and every citizen regardless of religious, ethnic or caste affiliation or identity, gender or class, disability or ability. However, the focus on access, as argued earlier, limits the agenda to a very narrowly framed policy agenda which is concerned more with meeting international targets for enrollment and universalization, than with taking into account some of the traditional relationships which have shaped exclusion. Little has been done to alter in a meaningful way the relationships between state administrators, elite village leadership, teachers and the poorer, low-caste groups within their communities (Subrahmanyan, 2000). Without an attempt to reorder these relationships through building alternative spaces and processes for hearing the perspectives of those excluded on what underpins their exclusion, what they feel about the education on offer, and how they see education fitting into their economic and social survival strategies, the right to education will have limited teeth for those who really would rely on it. Whilst many of these spaces are beginning to emerge in relation to education, far greater consolidation of these different actor groups is required through processes that enable excluded groups to develop and express voice. In this section, a brief assessment is made of the spaces and places within which participation in education takes place, is absent or needs to be strengthened.

       At present, legal spaces for holding the state accountable to its version of student ‘rights’ provide one option. However, as discussed above, these spaces are in themselves insufficient to provide leverage, and further only recognize the rights of those already ‘included’. Education ‘guarantee’ schemes, such as those in operation in Madhya Pradesh ‘guarantee’ schools in areas that demand them, but again, the type of schools, their quality and content fall outside the scope of citizen action and are controlled solely by the state. With increasing levels of donor funding directed towards the state and the attempt to consolidate policy spaces under sector and sub-sector approaches, there is the risk of further crystallizing the authority of the state over civil society and other organizations, and reducing transparency. While NGOs have been important innovators in education, especially in recent times, many of their ‘models’ are being absorbed directly into state programs, without clear analysis of what it is these models offer and what insights they provide into developing localized education strategies based on community ownership. Even where ‘community participation’ is invoked, as it is increasingly in state programs, there are insufficient attempts to address the foundational bases of inequality that prevent the most disadvantaged groups from expressing their views (see Subrahmanyan, forthcoming). Village Education Committees, heralded as the new face of community participation in education, are often bureaucratized forms of citizen voice formed with a view to rounding children up and sending them to school rather than eliciting the views of parents on what education content and delivery should be.

   Right to Education Act

       The Right of children to Free and Compulsory Education Act came into force from April 1, 2010. This was a historic day for the people of India as from this day the right to education will be accorded the same legal status as the right to life as provided by Article 21A of the Indian Constitution. Every child in the age group of 6-14 years will be provided 8 years of elementary education in an age appropriate classroom in the vicinity of his/her neighborhood.

      The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserted Article 21-A in the Constitution of India to provide free and compulsory education of all children in the age group of six to fourteen years as a Fundamental Right in such a manner as the State may, by law, determine. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which represents the consequential legislation envisaged under Article 21-A, means that every child has a right to full time elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality in a formal school which satisfies certain essential norms and standards.

         Article 21-A and the RTE Act came into effect on 1 April 2010. The title of the RTE Act incorporates the words ‘free and compulsory’, ‘Free education’ means that no child, other than a child who has been admitted by his or her parents to a school which is not supported by the appropriate Government, shall be liable to pay any kind of fee or charges or expenses which may prevent him or her from pursuing and completing elementary education. ‘Compulsory education’ casts an obligation on the appropriate Government and local authorities to provide and ensure admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by all children in the 6-14 age group. With this, India has moved forward to a rights based framework that casts a legal obligation on the Central and State Governments to implement this fundamental child right as enshrined in the Article 21A of the Constitution, in accordance with the provisions of the RTE Act