The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has taken effect, but experts say Maharashtra is ill prepared to implement its revolutionary provisions, owing to a lack of funds, shortage of teachers and poor infrastructure.
JM Abhyankar, former project director of Sarva Shikshan Abhiyan, said, “The state government knew the RTE Act will be implemented this year, but they are yet to allot funds to implement it. Forty-five per cent of the funds for RTE have to be provided by the state, but the state’s recent budget has ignored RTE.”
Educationist Vasant Kalpande, former state board chairman, said the priority should be allocation of funds. “They need to estimate the requirement and calculate the state’s share,” he said. “A proper plan is critical.”
But Snehalata Deshmukh, former vice-chancellor of Mumbai University, said it was unlikely that the state would be able to implement it this year. The only way to allocate money would be to make a supplementary budget, but that, too, would mean a delay in implementation of the act.
Abhyankar said the huge disparities in education require urgent attention. While in some private schools, the student-teacher ratio is 20:1, in government and aided schools, it is 60:1 or worse.
Balasaheb Kale, vice-president of the Maharashtra School Teachers’ Association, said, “The number of teachers should go up. But if you hire teachers on contract for three years for just Rs3,000 a month, why would anybody be interested?”
Kale said most schools also face difficulty in getting teachers’ posts sanctioned for grants. “If such is the condition, the state would not be able to do justice to the act,” he said.
Ramesh Joshi, deputy general secretary of the All-India Federation of Teachers’ Organisation and general secretary of the BMC Teachers’ Union, said, “Teacher training is an area long neglected. We need to scale up training programmes.”
Experts cite the lack of political will. “I don’t think the state has the intention to implement the act, nor will there be any transparency as over 70% of our educational institutions are run by politicians,” said Jayant Jain, president, Forum for Fairness in Education. He said the Centre should appoint independent monitoring committees headed by judicial authorities.
Advocate Amit Karkhanis said the government will have to set up a redressal mechanism to implement the act. “A student in distress can file a writ petition if he has been denied admission in a school, but how many poor students can afford to do so?”
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