Education, Careers & Professional News

Will this dream come true?

Source
DECCAN HERALD

Date
2005-10-31

Information
Will the long-delayed promise of free and compulsory elementary education to all children of Karnataka become a reality at least now? Not if one is to go by the latest Compulsory Primary Education Bill (CPE Bill) drafted by the Law Department of Karnataka. However, its well-meaning and pioneering effort to give effect to the Fundamental Right to education enunciated in Article 21A of the 86th Constitutional Amendment for all children between 6-14 years, even before the Centre has done so, needs to be lauded. Kathyayini Chamaraj tells us more.

The Compulsory Primary Education Bill defines neither free nor compulsory though, given their multifarious interpretations, there is a need to create clarity on them. Free education needs to connote freedom from all fees and universal provision of uniforms, text-books, notebooks, stationery and transportation, which are currently considered as incentives and not as part and parcel of the fundamental right to education.

It however introduces welcome provisions on the duty of SDMCs to counsel parents and makes the much-needed public awareness programmes, school admission drives, etc, with specific funding by local bodies, mandatory.

Compulsory attendance

The Bill makes elaborate provisions for compulsory attendance of the child by institutionalising a non-official, honourary Attendance Authority (AA) who shall keep track of all drop-outs. Considering his importance, would it not be advisable to make him a paid official, accountable for any out-of-school child?

He is to report to the tahsildar all recalcitrant parents. The tahsildar can withdraw a parents ration card, housing grant, employment guarantee, etc., if she or he fails to heed the tahsildars orders. However, the bizarre lacuna is that there is no provision requiring the tahsildar to provide any assistance to a genuinely needy family - as required under Article 46 of the Indian Constitution and Article 18(2) and 19 of the UNCRC - though countless studies reveal that the main reason for children dropping out of school is that their parents need them for family or wage labour. The parent may be facing several real constraints in fulfiling his/her childs right to education, such as lack of child care facilities for younger children, inadequate wages, unemployment, disability, etc.

Is the tahsildar the correct authority to be dealing with this issue? Preferable may be, to have the Child Welfare Committees set up under the Juvenile Justice Act handle this issue, which can better study the familys needs and ensure convergence of benefits of various departments on it.

Penalties for failure

Penalties for the failure to ensure the schooling of every eligible child has been imposed only on the Headmaster and teachers and not on the AA. Also, the end goal is only punishment of the parent or HM. Education of the out-of-school child, perhaps through admission in a free government hostel, needs to be the end- goal and not mere punishment of the parent or HM. A rights-based approach, which is called for by the 86th CA, would require this to be the end since a fundamental right is inalienable - it cannot be waived.

The pressing need for a Standing Committee on Education in both rural and urban local bodies, with a desirable multi-stakeholder representation, has been recognised. Strangely, membership of the AA on these committees is absent.

This whole elaborate edifice for ensuring attendance is however a miasma because the Bill says that if a child is receiving equivalent non-formal education, it shall be a reasonable excuse for non-attendance of the child in a full-time, formal school. This single provision undoes whatever good there is in this Bill. Also, the Bill says that if there is any compelling circumstance which temporarily prevents the child from attending school, it can be a reasonable excuse for non-attendance. In the absence of a definition of temporary and a limit on its duration, it could mean anything, including the childs need to look after younger siblings, earn for the family, work on the family farm, migrate with its parents, etc.

In view of these escape clauses, the Bill is actually legitimising and formalising the continuation of the two existing unequal streams of education, one for the rich and one for the poor. This is against Article 28 of the UNCRC which calls for education to all on the basis of equal opportunity and the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960).

Another glaring inadequacy of the Bill is its silence on the issue of quality of education which is seen by civil society as more crucial than that of mere attendance. The Bill speaks only of adequate building with furniture without specifying the number of classrooms and teachers, teacher-pupil ratio, etc, though it does speak of drinking water, playground and toilets. The content of curriculum also needs to include child rights, human rights and life skills education.

In fulfilment of the revised Article 45, which requires the State to endeavour to provide universal Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), the Bill says that it shall, to the best of its efforts and resources, establish as many pre-primary or anganawadi schools as possible for children between 3 and 6 years.

But given the huge number of girls not attending school because they are caring for younger siblings, this is simply not good enough. Also, given that Karnatakas IMR is poor, more than 30 per cent of children are born under-weight and 50 per cent are malnourished and are hence stunted, the need to provide ECCE facilities for children, not just between 3-6, but also 0-3, to all mothers seeking such services is imperative.

Strangely, the compulsory education provisions are completely divorced from those on child labour appearing in the more comprehensive Child Rights Bill, also being proposed, though both need to correspond. It would be logical to merge the two Bills.

The Bill needs to recognise the inalienable right to equitable and quality education of all children and to address the severe constraints faced by parents in providing education to their children, given the structural causes of their poverty and its worsening in the era of globalisation, if it is not to become another instrument of continual denial of education to the under-privileged in this country.

The writer was a member of the drafting committee set up by the Labour Department, GoK, for revising the State Action Plan on Child Labour.