When the Indian constitution was written in 1949 it included in Article 45, a commitment that the state, “shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years”1. That commitment was later deferred until 1970 then until 1980, 1990, 2000, and according to a recent announcement from the Human Resource Department, the target will be achieved by 2010 – and this time they mean it. After a series of delays that would embarrass even the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, many welcomed the Constitution Amendment Bill passed by the National parliament in November 2001, making free and compulsory education a fundamental right for all children aged six to 14 years. Reservations about the amendment bill have also been stated, however, with some seeing it as a dilution of earlier commitments, and others going further and calling it a step backwards. Will the 70 million children out of school in India finally get the education they need? And what about the wider issues of ensuring quality: ensuring that children in all sections of society get access to decent, good-quality schools and the social support they need to attend them?

Education in India – the situation

Literacy. Literacy figures vary widely depending on the method of calculation; it seems the figure for overall literacy in India is somewhere between 54% and 65% 2 .Table 1 uses figures from the 2001 Census, to show the literacy rates for different groups.

Literacy (calculated from figures from 2001 Census website)

Total Male Female
Total 55% 64% 46%
Rural 49% 59% 39%
Urban 70% 76% 64%
Slums 64% 70% 56%

One striking feature of the table is the disparity between male and female literacy: 64% versus 46%. The disparity is larger in rural areas than urban areas, presumably reflecting various factors such as the greater degree of poverty in rural areas and the greater adherence to traditional sex stereotypes. Chart 1 shows how, while adult literacy has risen steadily since Independence, the gap between male and female literacy has not closed. Consequently the right to education of the girl child has become a key focus point for international institutions, the Indian government, and NGOs alike.

The disparity between literacy in rural and urban areas is also stark, with slum areas falling in between. Apart from the greater degree of poverty in rural areas, issues of the rural-urban divide include the lack of schools in remote areas - according to the Ministry of Education about 17% of habitations lack access to a school within one kilometre3; the apparent tendency of teachers to opt for cushy urban posts instead of rural ones, leading to understaffing; parents’ perceptions of the poor quality of teaching and poor condition of rural schools4; and lack of awareness of the importance of education.

While literacy overall has risen steadily, it should be noted that it is substantially below that of other comparable countries, such as China, whose literacy rate is 88%. Furthermore some areas within India have achieved far higher literacy rates than the national average, most noticeably the state of Kerala (93%), and these achievements cannot be attributed solely to economic disparities between regions. Both China and the state of Kerala have also succeeded in narrowing the ender gap.5

School attendance, enrolment and dropout. Again, figures vary widely. It seems between one-third and one-half of 6-14 year-olds in India are not going to school: between 56 and 70 million children6 from a total of around 170 million. This astonishing statistic reflects both large numbers of children not being enrolled in school in the first place, and even larger numbers who start school but drop out before the age of 14.The problem of drop-out can be illustrated by looking at the adult population. In 1991 the majority of adults (56.7%) have had less than three years of education, and less than 20% had seven or more years. As with the literacy data, there is a large gender difference in amount of education: 68.4% of women had less than three years, and only 12.3% had seven or more years.7 The figures for current dropouts are equally shocking: in the school year 1997-1998, 45% of children in the first five classes dropped out, rising to 60% in the first eight classes8.Chart 2 shows how enrolment in primary school has grown relatively rapidly since 1950 whilst enrolment numbers in middle and secondary school have lagged behind.

Factors in school non-attendance include: children working to supplement family income; taking on housework and childcare responsibilities so that both parents can go out to work, especially female children; perceptions of the poor quality of government schools; costs of schooling, such as books and uniforms; and lacking the required certificates to enrol in school. Migrant families face particular problems, for instance children whose previous education was in one language, can find themselves unable to re-enter school at the same level when their families move to a state with a different language.

In preparing this article I was struck by the abundance of data available on literacy and the scarcity of detailed information on what education people have had. No doubt this is partly because literacy is easier to quantify. The tendency to concentrate on literacy statistics obscures the fact that worryingly few children are acquiring much education beyond basic literacy, and has also been implicated in what is seen by critics as the Indian government’s gradual abandonment of its commitment to a full education for all children. 9

Without denying the vital importance of literacy to people’s everyday lives, the tendency of international agencies as well as the Indian State and National Governments to focus on literacy is potentially an impediment to a proper examination of the quantity, quality, content and values of the education children are getting.

The new Bill. The amendment Bill passed in November 2001 was supposed to make education a fundamental right for all children.The Bill proposed as the 93rd Amendment to the Constitution, the creation of a new article, Article 21A, stating that; The state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to 14 years in such manner as the state may, by law, determine.10

Article 21 concerns the fundamental Right to Life of all citizens. This amendment was inserted as Article 21A because its origins lie in the Unnikrishnan judgement of the Supreme Court in 1993, which stated that education is a fundamental right stemming from the Right to Life. The original content of Article 45 was replaced with a statement on the provision of Early Childhood Care: The state shall endeavour to provide early childhood care and education for all children until they complete the age of six years.11 In addition the Bill inserted a new clause under Article 51A, which defines the Fundamental Duties of the citizen, stating: It shall be the duty of every citizen of India who is a parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education to his child, or, as the case may be, ward between the age of six and fourteen years.12

Criticism of the Bill. Criticisms of the bill fall under four main categories:

Article 21A refers to children in the age group of six to 14 years only. Thus pre-school education, early childhood care and education for the 14–18 years group are ignored. Early childhood care and education is referred to in article 45 as something the state should ‘endeavour’ to provide, not as a fundamental right. the new clause under Article 51A raises the possibility of parents who are unable to send their children to school being prosecuted, and also can be seen as shifting responsibility from the state to parents the Bill is unspecific or unsatisfactory with regard to details such as funding for education and ensuring high quality the proviso in Article 21A, “in such manner as the state may, by law, determine” has aroused suspicions that the intention is to open the doors to various alternative and second-rate methods of education as an alternative to formal government schools.

Early childhood care and education. Early childhood care and education (ECCE) is valuable in its own right, as a preparation for school and a means of enhancing the child’s prospects of getting a good education once he or she begins school. However it also plays an important role in the financial situation of the family, by allowing parents to go out to work instead of staying at home to look after children. In this way ECCE empowers women, since it is normally women who would be allotted childcare responsibility. A third, and crucial, role of ECCE is that it allows siblings of young children to go to school. In families where both parents have to work childcare responsibilities often fall onto the older siblings, especially females: this is one reason for India’s large gender disparities in literacy and level of education.

The Supreme Court’s Unnikrishnan judgement had declared education a fundamental right for all children up to the age of fourteen, and so the fact that the Bill refers to the 6-14 age group was seen by campaigners as a dilution of the previous ruling. The National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education (NAFRE) claimed that many children, especially girls, within the 6-14 age group would be effectively excluded from the benefits of the changes because of the need to look after their younger siblings.13

Post 14 education. The Unnikrishnan judgement did not ignore the 14-18 age group but stated that “after a child/citizen completes 14 years, his right to education is circumscribed by the limits of the economic capacity of the state and its development.” However India is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) which posits 18 years as a cut-off point for the end of childhood. It has been argued that defining 14 year olds as no longer children is a hrowback to the days when the Indian Constitution was framed, based on assumptions that are not applicable to the modern world. Anil Sadgopal argues that “education up to Class VIII, as implied by Article 45, made sense when the Constitution was drafted ... Today without a Class XII certificate, a young person stands little chance of obtaining either employment or admission to professional courses”14. Furthermore, poorer children and those whose parents who are uneducated may have difficulties progressing through school, often joining late and having to repeat classes. Thus setting the relevant age range as six to 14 years could mean many not even reaching Class VIII. Finally, it has been noted that the benefits of India’s reservation system for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, designed to improve access for these disadvantaged groups to further education and employment, only become available after Class X or XII.15

Duty of the parents. The Bill makes it a fundamental duty of parents to “provide opportunities for education”. During the debate about the Bill the government insisted it was not the intention to penalise parents who failed to fulfil this duty.16 However critics have pointed out that between 1951 and 1971, at least 1.5m parents were prosecuted under the State Compulsory Education Act, which was in force in 19 of India’s states, giving grounds for concern that this clause could be used by local officialdom as an excuse to harass parents, and by States to avoid the blame for out-of-school children.17

Perhaps the clause could be used in a positive way, as a tool for impressing on parents the importance of education, and their role in getting their children to go to school. It is also in keeping with the human rights approach to education provision: a right accorded to one party correlates with duties of other relevant parties. The right to education correlates with a duty of all concerned – such as parents, communities, and State and National governments – not to stand in the way of that right. However, it may be more useful to ask why parents don’t send their children to school. A study in 2001 by Jean Dreze and Geeta Gandhi Kingdon challenged the idea that parents are not interested in education or fail to understand the importance of it. Reasons put forward instead are the poor quality of state schools, shortage of teachers, and the fact that chool meals are not provided.18

Funding. The financial memorandum attached to the Bill says that an additional Rs. 98bn per year will be provided for the next ten years to implement the bill. This is in contrast to the recommendation of the Tapas Majumdar Committee, set up in 1999 to improvements needed in the education system, that an extra Rs. 140bn would be needed to provide formal schooling to all out of-school children 19. This has reinforced suspicions that ‘alternative’ or parallel-stream education is what the government has in mind for many such children.

Alternative education. The proviso at the end of Article 21A,“in such manner as the State may, by law, determine”, may seem innocuous but in the light of the government’s history of delaying universal education, has been seen as opening the way for various alternatives forms of education, rather than regular, formal schools. In fact such alternative education schemes have been around for some time as a way of giving some kind of education to children who, for whatever reasons, are not going to school.

Non-formal education centres, which were introduced into government policy as a ‘parallel stream’ to formal education in 1986, come in many different forms. Ideally, such centres are meant to address the failure of formal schools to give children education in ways which are geared towards their lives. In general schools are criticised for their emphasis on rote learning and for not giving lessons in ways which interest and stimulate the child. With respect to working children and the children of poor families, the educationist J P Naik criticised the formal education system in the 1970s for its inflexibility: for children who started school late, there was no option but to enter Class I with the younger children, receiving teaching geared towards younger children, and progress through the classes at the same speed. Naik suggested an alternative, elastic schooling system, with multiple entry points, flexible teaching for the differing needs of different groups of children, and timetables and calendars oriented towards the children’s lives, for example, allowing time off for sowing and harvesting in rural areas.20

The type of education currently offered by such alternative systems varies widely. The systems are run by community-based organisations and NGOs, sometimes as part of wider government-backed schemes, with different aims, philosophies and target groups. Generally the ‘teachers’ employed by such schemes have not been trained and recruited in the traditional way; often they are recruited from amongst the local community, for instance in Rajasthan in the 1980s teaching staff were recruited from amongst the local unemployed youth 21. Community involvement often extends beyond the recruitment of teachers, with local government (‘panchayati raj’) institutions and other community organisations having a role in the running of the school.

Scepticism about these schemes stems not least from the fact that they are usually much cheaper than formal schools. The Tapas Majumdar committee mentioned earlier did not advocate such low-cost alternatives because it said they often tended to “flounder in the absence of adequate resource support over a long period of time”22. Similarly, critics of the ‘education guarantee scheme’ of Madhya Pradesh state, have noted that, Far from being criticized for the abysmally rudimentary facilities it offers, it has been praised for reaching the unreached. So successful has been the publicity that the abnegation of recruitment norms, the poor quality of teacher training, and the exploitative cycle in which it places primary level teachers are completely overlooked.23 The community involvement in such schemes is seen by critics as a possible early step towards the eventual privatisation of primary schools; World Bank involvement in the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), under which many such alternative education centres have been set up, has only fuelled such suspicions. Perhaps the crucial issue in alternative education is whether it is seen as a ‘parallel stream’ in which children who are not suitable for formal schools are placed, and kept there – or as a steppingstone for children not able to start school immediately. Without denying the value of the education provided by these schemes, they do not provide the essential certificates needed to get higher status jobs and for entry into higher education. The National government’s latest document on its Education Guarantee Scheme (which it plans to extend nationally), acknowledges that generally the numbers of children passing from alternative into formal schools is low, and that linkages between the two systems are lacking. According to this document the thrust from now on is on enrolling children into formal schools, and in as many cases as possible ‘mainstreaming’ those children, such as street children, children of migrant families, child labourers and some adolescent girls, whose circumstances make it especially difficult for them to start formal school.

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