Anahita Mukherji I TNN
Mumbai: After a three-year wait, the Union cabinet has finally cleared the Right to Education Bill, a revolutionary piece of legislation that aims to change the face of education in India. But whether the Bill will be passed in parliament before the elections is a million dollar question. If it is not passed, it will lapse and the next government will have to re-introduce the Bill from scratch.
While the next Lok Sabha session will be in December, it will probably be a very short session.“The government will have to be really pro-active if it wants to pass the Bill in the December session,’’ says Vinod Raina, one of the architects of the Bill.
If the Bill is not passed in the December session, and the
elections are held around May, the government will get another shot at passing the Bill if there’s another Lok Sabha session. But if elections are held earlier, the Bill will lapse. This will be the case even if the UPA government wins elections.
There is, however, an alternative. Though ‘Money Bills’ such as this one are normally introduced in the Lok Sabha, if a way was found to introduce this Bill in Rajya Sabha instead, it will not lapse and can be carried forward by the next government.
The Right to Education Bill is revolutionary in several respects. It aims to set minimum standards for both public and private schools so that the quality of education improves throughout the country and current inequities are levelled. The pupil-teacher ratio prescribed by the Bill is 40:1.
A controversial clause in the Bill makes it compulsory for all private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for poor children from the neighbourhood. This includes elite ICSE and IB schools.
In a bid to drastically improve the quality of education, the Bill has outlawed non-formal education. Non-formal schools across the country will have three years to upgrade themselves to formal schools, which provide the minimum standards prescribed by the Bill.
The Bill has also done away with the contract system of appointing teachers. Currently, schools can appoint teachers on a contract basis and pay them a paltry sum of Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 a month. Often, they’re not qualified. According to the Bill, all teachers, both in private and government schools, will be appointed on a permanent basis and given full salary as long as they are qualified.
When the Bill was drafted in August 2005, the government canned it on the grounds that it was too expensive at Rs 3,21,000 crore. The Bill was virtually buried for two years. In between, a mid-census correction reduced the child population by six million, so budgets were halved from Rs 3,21,000 crore to Rs 1,51,000 crore. So a team of educationists, two of whom were involved in the drafting of the Bill, wrote a letter to the prime minister appraising him of the situation.
The PM met them in August 2007 and a new draft of the Bill was created in February 2008. The Bill was tossed between several ministries, including law and finance, before it finally reached the cabinet in August.
Mumbai: After a three-year wait, the Union cabinet has finally cleared the Right to Education Bill, a revolutionary piece of legislation that aims to change the face of education in India. But whether the Bill will be passed in parliament before the elections is a million dollar question. If it is not passed, it will lapse and the next government will have to re-introduce the Bill from scratch.
While the next Lok Sabha session will be in December, it will probably be a very short session.“The government will have to be really pro-active if it wants to pass the Bill in the December session,’’ says Vinod Raina, one of the architects of the Bill.
If the Bill is not passed in the December session, and the
elections are held around May, the government will get another shot at passing the Bill if there’s another Lok Sabha session. But if elections are held earlier, the Bill will lapse. This will be the case even if the UPA government wins elections.
There is, however, an alternative. Though ‘Money Bills’ such as this one are normally introduced in the Lok Sabha, if a way was found to introduce this Bill in Rajya Sabha instead, it will not lapse and can be carried forward by the next government.
The Right to Education Bill is revolutionary in several respects. It aims to set minimum standards for both public and private schools so that the quality of education improves throughout the country and current inequities are levelled. The pupil-teacher ratio prescribed by the Bill is 40:1.
A controversial clause in the Bill makes it compulsory for all private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for poor children from the neighbourhood. This includes elite ICSE and IB schools.
In a bid to drastically improve the quality of education, the Bill has outlawed non-formal education. Non-formal schools across the country will have three years to upgrade themselves to formal schools, which provide the minimum standards prescribed by the Bill.
The Bill has also done away with the contract system of appointing teachers. Currently, schools can appoint teachers on a contract basis and pay them a paltry sum of Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 a month. Often, they’re not qualified. According to the Bill, all teachers, both in private and government schools, will be appointed on a permanent basis and given full salary as long as they are qualified.
When the Bill was drafted in August 2005, the government canned it on the grounds that it was too expensive at Rs 3,21,000 crore. The Bill was virtually buried for two years. In between, a mid-census correction reduced the child population by six million, so budgets were halved from Rs 3,21,000 crore to Rs 1,51,000 crore. So a team of educationists, two of whom were involved in the drafting of the Bill, wrote a letter to the prime minister appraising him of the situation.
The PM met them in August 2007 and a new draft of the Bill was created in February 2008. The Bill was tossed between several ministries, including law and finance, before it finally reached the cabinet in August.
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