NEP 2020: Disregarding a fundamental right

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 proposes ‘universalisation’ of education for all children from the age of three to 18 years. But one finds no reference in the entire document to education already being a Fundamental Right as per the Right to Education (RTE) Act, at least for children between six and fourteen years of age. Also, there is a single reference in the NEP to ‘free and compulsory education’, just in passing.

Ambarish Rai, national convener of the Right to Education Forum points out, “The final policy talks about universalisation of school education from 3-18 years, without making it a legal right. Hence there is no mandatory mechanism for the union and state governments to make it a reality”. “Without the RTE Act, universalisation will be very difficult,” he says. One would have thought that an extension of the Fundamental Right to the ages from 3–18 years was what could be considered an improvement over the already existing RTE Act.

The NEP is mostly about the school, its infrastructure, curriculum and intra-classroom pedagogy, etc. Not that these are not important, but it is as though the economic, political and societal contexts in which the child and the school are located have no bearing on the outcomes of education. One fails to find a single reference in the entire document to ‘child labour’, or ‘child marriage’ as factors impeding a child’s education.

The question that is not analysed in the policy is why after more than ten years of the RTE Act, making education a justiciable Fundamental Right, more than two crore children are still out of school and only 12% schools have fulfilled RTE norms. Should not the reasons for this failure have been analysed so that corresponding corrective steps could have been suggested?

Two overall initiatives to bring back all drop-outs and retain them have been outlined, which is “to provide effective and sufficient infrastructure so that all students have access to safe and engaging school education” and providing “regular trained teachers at each stage”. Will mere pious statements as the above solve the problem, when most studies do not say that these are the main reasons why children drop out? Do the solutions proposed address the root causes?

There is also talk of engaging “counsellors or well-trained social workers” to continuously engage with students, their parents and communities to ensure that all children are in school. But can this be a substitute for the “lack of effective enforcement mechanisms at grassroots level to make claims on the State to fulfil its Constitutional duty of ensuring the Right to Education” and demand legal accountability from the system? This is what Florian Matthey-Prakash in his book, “The Right to Education in India”, says is impeding fulfilment of the Right to Education.

Also, a PIL in the Supreme Court by the Akhil Delhi Prathmik Shikshal Sangh questioned the lack of accountability in the system for implementing the RTE Act, as approximately 3.68 crore children were out of school as of 2015-16. The final order in this PIL has not made it clear whether the Fundamental Right ensured by the RTE Act is genuinely justiciable. As per newspaper reports, while a Bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Mishra said “This is a very, very good petition,” in January 2018, a Bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, dismissed the same petition in November 2018, saying, “Don’t expect miracles. India is a huge, huge country…”. Should not the NEP have examined the extant grievance redressal mechanisms under the RTE Act available at the panchayath and municipal levels and at the level of the State Commissions for Protection of Child Rights to enable better access to justice for those denied their rights under the RTE Act?

Another aspirational statement in the NEP is to “universalize” ECCE and ensure that every Anganwadi has “a well-ventilated, well-designed, child-friendly and well-constructed building with an enriched learning environment”. But how is it that studies point out that over 3 lakh anganwadi centres still don’t have proper toilets and over 1.5 lakh lack potable drinking water as of December 2019, though there is already a Supreme Court ruling of 28th November 2001 in the Right to Food case that ECCE should be universalized? The SC directed that every habitation should have a functional Anganwadi and that ICDS services should be extended to all children up to the age of six years. Do we have an analysis of what went wrong and why this has remained a distant dream almost twenty years later?

A fresh measure being proposed in the NEP is to make all children learn at least one vocation from class six through secondary school. Making all children learn a vocation is debatable if some are capable of taking up academic tertiary education. But when secondary education is not being made compulsory and the Child Labour Act allows children of 15 to 18 years to discontinue education and enter the workforce without any skills, how will these children gain the proposed vocational skills? There is no point trying to catch them and skill them later in life while hordes continue to enter the labour market without skills.

What is necessary is to ensure children do not enter the labour market without gaining certified vocational skills by the time they are 18 years, if they have less capability for academics. But this requires that secondary education for children between 15 to 18 years in both the vocational and academic streams is first made compulsory and the Child Labour Act is amended to ban all work by children under 18 years.

A complete abdication of a rights-based approach and sidelining of the RTE Act is what is woven tacitly into the entire NEP 2020 document.

(The writer is Executive Trustee of CIVIC Bangalore)