'Educating Sita' no easy feat in India

Sita does not go to school. This pithy, axiomatic sentence - perhaps born out of someone's smart idea that the British title Educating Rita could be profitably nativized - is a common refrain in India, often resorted to by experts who throw dismal statistics at the self-obsessed chattering classes in India as a shock tactic.
Well, despite their sustained exertions, it has taken India's executive and chief legislature six decades of independence to make free education for school-going children the law. The ball, first set rolling by a Supreme Court ruling that elementary education must be made a fundamental right, took 16 years to reach the goal.
After parliament passed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education bill, parents across the country, whether rustic or urbane, poor or wealthy, backward or forward, will have to send Sita and her brother - basically, all children between the ages six and 14 - to school without fail. Otherwise, it would be treated as a violation of law. Of course, Sita will first have to be born, crossing the primary hurdle of female foeticide, before making her way to school. But that's another long story.
Needless to say, it is not merely parental reluctance - which, where it does exist, stems from the need to have extra pairs of hand at work - that keeps poor children away from school. Scores of people are theoretically poised on the verge of flouting the law only because there may be nothing that can fall within an acceptable definition of a school within miles of their habitat. It is a common enough deprivation in India.
Hence the state, too, has its role demarcated. The bill places the onus of providing certifiable infrastructure to support free education squarely on the state's shoulders. As for the school itself, whether privately run or government-funded/sponsored, the bill mandates that it will have to reserve 25% of its seats for students from the economically backward sections of the population at scholarship rates.
This has created a little storm in the teacup, with one section of the education sector shouting from the rooftops that there would be the inevitable problems of integration (between the rich and poor kids bundled together) and this by itself carries the potential for social tension. Others blame the government for having first come up woefully short in universalizing access to quality education infrastructure and then passing the burden of free education onto the private sector.
The unsaid part is a basic resentment at having the limited supply of seats in quality private schools - seen, quite simply, as among the sort of goodies you can buy with money, a class privilege - hived off to fill "welfare" quotas. When caste-based reservations in higher education created mass wrath among the more privileged castes two decades ago (and ever since), the argument always was that caste was an invalid category in a modern society - and only an economic criterion of deprivation would be acceptable. Now that one such comes along, naturally the logical warfare must move to a different trench.
But at the lawmaker's end, the biggest debate is about finances. The states and Delhi are yet to thrash out how exactly they will share the burden. The disquiet is understandable because the estimated cost of implementing the compulsory free education bill is said to be almost US$11.5 billion a year.
The Planning Commission had earlier expressed its inability to fork out that kind of money. Convinced that state governments may not have the wherewithal to implement the bill, economists and education evangelists are criticizing Delhi for putting out a blank check with nobody's signature on it.
The ruling Congress party, however, has its own political compulsions. It had promised compulsory free education to voters in its election manifesto. This bill sits well with the socialistic, "we-are-for-the-common-man" image being cultivated by the party, and has been rolled out in a hurry in keeping with the pacey mode of government suggested by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 100-day work schedule. Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal is thrilled to have been able to keep to the schedule. Law Minister Veerappa Moily had had to withdraw his bill on judicial reform at the introduction stage. The Right to Education bill had no such hiccups as it was supported by parties across the political spectrum.
The nagging doubts about its economic feasibility are not going to go away too soon, though. It was, in fact, by citing the "impossible" financial burden of such an enterprise that Mahatma Gandhi's dogged demand for making free school education a fundamental right was averted by the post-independence government. Even now, there is a lack of clarity on who will foot the bill, on whether the state will come forward.
This owes to the federal structure of education in India. Education is on the concurrent list and any sweeping, pan-India law on this front has to have the states totally on board for it to have any meaning. In many ways, India follows a federal structure of administration.
Sources in the Human Resource Development Ministry say in case the states refuse to share the burden, throwing up their hands in the name of fund shortages, the newly passed bill will be referred to the Finance Commission, which then will sort out the funding issue. If the states happen to show a positive mindset, the central government will replicate the pattern it follows for the present school enrollment scheme - the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All). It operates on a 70:30 ratio with Delhi picking up the hefty part of the bill.
"We as a nation cannot afford our children not going to schools," Sibal says, by way of trying to introduce a moral obligation to propel Delhi and the states in their task of providing free and compulsory education to children. Though he was initially accused of going too fast, his approach has rested on the persuasive appeal of structural-reformist elements. For instance, this bill also aims to stop the scourge of private tuition facilities, which are sustained by the highly competitive school board exams.
Funds are not the only issue. A day before the Upper House of parliament passed the bill, disability groups were up in arms, alleging that the draft deliberately excluded disabled children from its ambit. This, in effect, would mean that 30 million disabled children have no formal right to education.
Activists accused minister Kapil Sibal of engineering a u-turn from the United Progressive Alliance government's earlier policy on education for the disabled. They pointed out that Sibal's predecessor, Arjun Singh, had made a promise on the floor of the House, during the 14th Lok Sabha (the Lower House's previous term), that education would be universal across all groups.
Activists also accused Sibal of not being aware of the commitment made in the 11th five-year plan document. They even claimed that a specific clause that took care of the needs and rights of disabled children just disappeared from the bill after Sibal took over. Finally, the prime minister had to come out to mollify the aggrieved group with a special instruction to his human resources minister.
Despite these fundamental shortcomings, and whatever other teething trouble it is bound to encounter in a country as large as India, the bill does represent a historic and decisive turn from the past.
It promises to bring the light of education into the lives of millions of young boys and girls forced into laboring in small-scale hazardous industries, farmlands, households, hotels and the like to earn a living. Or, maybe merely crisscrossing the map with their migrant labor parents until they, too, get sucked up into the system.