Right To Education Act

The other day I was watching a discussion on a certain news channel where Mr.Kapil Sibal was addressing the concerns on the Right to education act.

Before witnessing the discussion my opinion about the act was that it is a wonderful act which is a big step forward in a progressive yet orthodox (quite an oxymoron) country like India. But my judgement was based on certain generic assumptions and excitement of the right step taken forward.

During the course of the discussion on the show there were certain very true concerns and statistics that I came to know about. 220 million go to school, but a staggering 202 million do not go on to college level education every year. Out of the total schools in India 93% are government schools and the rest are private and majority of students going on to college level education come out from private schools. There are a total of 55 lakh teachers in India still there is a gap of 5 lakh teachers vacancy that need to be filled. The teacher student ratio in India stands 1:30 seems far fetched but true and if I am not mistaken the total figure for the implementation stands at 175,000 cr.

What do these statistics mean, it throws light on very real ground level problems. How will the ground level implementation happen, how will the act be deemed successful and how would we define this success. The question does not lie with the government alone but it lies with us.

The government particularly Mr.Sibal has done his major part of the job of implementing the wonderful initiative as a fundamental right, now in order to make use of this we do not have to look at them for more added support, it is us the society to shun the bias, shun the elitist thinking, shun the ego. and do the right thing come out in full support of the act and its successful implementation. Contribute, share, let us make sure that this is truly successfully implemented.

Concerns like quality of education provided by the teachers, methodology adopted by teachers and many more concerns like these are going to be addressed by the government. Concerns like the funding problems, concerns of parents protesting in schools silently to discourage under privileged children to be admitted to high profile schools, wide spread setting up of schools across the country with the proper infra structure should be the collective responsibility of the society at large.

In conclusion the possibility of this act being successful seems real. Because it is very well understood that we cannot afford not to make this possible and that is the bottom line.

"Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions." -- William Allin