Question- What do you mean by Common School System. Discuss its future in India.

Ans.

Common School System and the Future of India

The debate on Right to Education was initiated by Mahatma Jotirao Phule almost 125 years ago when a substantial part of the memorandum presented by him to the Indian Education Commission (i.e. the Hunter Commission) in 1882 dwelt upon how the British government’s funding of education tended to benefit “Brahmins and the higher classes” while leaving “the masses wallowing in ignorance and poverty.” Mahatma Phule drew attention to the irony that this happens when most of the revenue collected by the British government is generated from the output of the labour of the masses themselves. Things have not fundamentally changed place In 1911 when Gopal Krishna Gokhle Compulsory Education Bill in the Imperial Legislative Assembly, he faced stiff resistance. Instead of supporting the Bill, the members representing the privileged classes from Mumbai, Maharajas and other rulers from princely states and the big landlords from feudal areas talked of the conditions in the country not being ripe for such a Bill and that haste should be avoided. The Maharaja of Darbhanga from Bihar collected 11,000 signatures on a Memorandum from princes and landlords expressing concern about what would happen to their farm operations if all children were required to attend the school! The Bill obviously could not be approved. At the National Education Conference held at Wardha (Maharashtra) in 1937, Mahatma Gandhi had to use all the moral powers at his command to persuade the Ministers of Education of the newly elected Congress governments of seven provinces to give priority to Basic Education (Nai Talim) of seven years and allocate adequate funds for this purpose. The Ministers kept on pointing out that there was no money.

During the Constituent Assembly debate in 1948-49, a member contended that the commitment made in the draft Article (later to be known as Article 45) to provide “free and compulsory education” to children up to 14 years of age should be limited to only 11 years of age as India would not have the necessary resources. The dilution would have been made but for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s clarity of mind that it is at this age of 11 years that a substantial proportion of children become child labourers. He forcefully argued that the place for children at this age in independent India should be in schools, rather than in farms or factories. This is how an unambiguous commitment to provide free education through regular full-time schools to all children up to 14 years of age (including children below 6 years) by 1960 became an integral component of India’s Constitution. This implies that the persistence of more than half of our children today in the school going age group of 6-14 years as out-of-school children (at least 5 crores of them being child labourers) constitutes a clear violation of the Constitution. Likewise, the provision of non-formal education in the National Policy on Education-1986 as well as the parallel streams of facilities of varying qualities in the World Bank-sponsored District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) of the 1990s and the ongoing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (about 35% of its funds are from World Bank, European Union, DFID and other international agencies) violate the basic spirit of the Constitution as all these are designed to co-exist with both the child labour and inequality in society.

The rhetoric of lack of resources for mass education has continued to dominate policy formulation since Independence. In June 2006, the Central Government, claiming lack of resources, decided not to present the Right to Education Bill in the Parliament in spite of it becoming obligatory under Article 21A introduced through 86th Constitutional Amendment in December 2002. Instead, the central government sent a highly diluted and distorted draft Bill to the state/UT governments advising them to get it approved in their respective assemblies. This amounted to blatant abdication by the centre of its Constitutional obligation to give effect to the historic Fundamental Right accorded to elementary education for children in the 6-14 year age group. The Indian State is so scared of giving children Fundamental Right to Education that it has not even notified the 86th Constitutional Amendment to date though it was signed by the President of India more than five years ago.

Right to Education as Envisioned in the Constitution

The majority comprising the upper classes and upper castes in the Constituent Assembly ignored Dr. Ambedkar’s plea to place Article 45 in Part III of the Constitution, thereby denying education the status of a Fundamental Right in modern India. Instead, this Article was placed in Part IV of the Constitution making it a Directive Principle of the State Policy. In spite of this denial, there are five critical dimensions of the vision of education that emerges from the Constitution which must guide social movements in their struggle to gain Right to Education. First, this was the only Article among Directive Principles (Part IV) that had spelt out a time frame for its fulfillment viz. within ten years of the commencement of the Constitution. The political leadership, irrespective of its ideological orientation, has so far failed to meet this obligation. Second, the children below six years of age were included in the reference to the children up to 14 years of age in Article 45. This made the provision of Early Childhood Care (including nutrition, health care and balanced development) along with pre-primary education of the children from birth to six years of age a Constitutional obligation of the State. Third, the Constitution placed the agenda of eight years of elementary education before the State, rather than merely five years of primary education. In this light, the attempt by the policy makers since the 1990s, as reflected in World Bank-sponsored DPEP, to reduce this agenda to primary education must be viewed as being violative of the Constitution’s vision. Fourth, elementary education must be provided in such manner as not to violate other provisions of the Constitution, especially Fundamental Rights. For instance, educational planning must be consonant with the principles of equality and social justice enshrined as Fundamental Rights. This has major implications that we will take up when we discuss the agenda of Common School System. It would suffice to state here that any programme that provides education of varying quality to different sections of society and denies education of equitable quality is not allowed by the Constitution. Fifth, the Article 45 should have been invariably read in conjunction with Article 46 which directs the State to give special attention to the education of the SCs and STs.

The discourse on Right to Education got a new turn with Supreme Court’s Unnikrishnan’s Judgement (1993). In this almost revolutionary interpretation of the Constitution, the Supreme Court stated that Article 45 in Part IV of the Constitution must be read in "harmonious construction" with Article 21 (Right to Life) in Part III since Right to Life is meaningless if it is without access to knowledge. Thus the Supreme Court in 1993 accorded the status of Fundamental Right to “free and compulsory education” of all children up to 14 years of age (including children below six years of age).

Right to Education and the Ruling Class

The above historic declaration by the Supreme Court in 1993 made India’s ruling class uncomfortable. The central government undertook a series of exercises in the following years designed to extricate itself of the implication of the judgment. The Saikia Committee Report (1997) and the 83rd Constitutional Amendment Bill (August 1997) along with the report of the HRD Ministry-related Parliamentary Committee (November 1997) provide evidence of the clever ways being conceived in order to dilute and

156 / B.Ed. (I Semester)

distort the concept of the Fundamental Right to education. However, there was public criticism of these attempts. Intellectuals, activists and people’s organizations presented memoranda of their concerns to the Parliamentary Committee and organized public debates engaging leadership of major political parties (e.g. Delhi University Convention, December, 1997). Sensing this resistance, the entire matter of Right to Education was put in cold storage for the next four years.

In November 2001, the 86th Constitutional Amendment Bill was presented to the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of Parliament). This Bill, like its predecessor 83rd Amendment Bill, too, was flawed. It was misconceived insofar it (a) excluded almost 17 crore children up to six years of age from the provision of Fundamental Right to free early childhood care and pre-primary education; (b) restricted the Fundamental Right of even the 6-14 year age group by placing a conditionality in the form of the phrase “as the State may, by law, determine” in Article 21A; this gave the State the instrumentality to restrict, dilute and distort the Fundamental Right given through Article 21A; (c) shifted the Constitutional obligation towards free and compulsory education from the State to the parents/guardians by making it their Fundamental Duty under Article 51A (k) to “provide opportunities for education” to their children in the 6-14 age group; and (d) reduced, as per the Financial Memorandum attached to the amendment Bill, the State’s financial commitment by almost 30% of what was estimated by the Tapas Majumdar Committee in 1999.

There was widespread public criticism of the anti-people character of the above Bill. A rally of 40,000 people, drawn from different parts of the country, at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds held on the day the Bill was discussed in the Lok Sabha (Nov. 28, 2001) demanded radical amendments in the Bill. Several Lok Sabha MPs, cutting across party lines, also criticized the Bill. In public mind, it was becoming clear that the hidden agenda of the Bill was not to accord the status of Fundamental Right to elementary education but to snatch away the comprehensive right that the children up to 14 years of age had gained through the Unnikrishnan Judgment. Ignoring the public outcry, however, a consensus was arrived at among all the political parties of varying ideological backgrounds and the Bill was passed in both Houses of the Parliament without even a single dissenting vote. The aforesaid four flaws in the Bill, now legitimized through the 86th Amendment in December 2002, have since provided the basis for misconceiving the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and, more recently, the so-called Model Bill viz. Draft Right to Education Bill (2006) sent to the state/UT governments.

It is noteworthy that the new Article 21A introduced through the 86th Amendment is the only Fundamental Right that has been given conditionally. As pointed out above, this Right will be given to the children “as the State may, by law, determine.” None of the other Fundamental Rights is tied to such a pre-condition. It is precisely this legislation that both the NDA and UPA governments failed to finalise and present in the Parliament. The latest move of the centre in June 2006 to shelve the Bill altogether by sending a flawed draft to the states/UTs, amounts to abdication by the Indian State of its Constitutional obligations. Why did it become necessary for the ruling elite to incorporate such a pre-condition in Article 21A in the first place and then not to enact the legislation as per its requirement? In order to answer this question, we must examine the major policy shift that has taken place as a result of the adoption of the so-called economic reforms and the neo-liberal agenda of globalization.

One matter must be settled at this juncture. The ruling elite imagines that, as a result of the 86th Amendment and introduction of Article 21A, it has succeeded in divesting the children below six years of age of their Right to Education, including right to Early Childhood care and pre-primary education. However, the fact is that this amendment does not negate Supreme Court’s Unnikrishnan Judgment (1993) which directed that the original Article 45 of Part IV may be read in harmonious construction with Article 21 (Right to Life) of Part III. This raised the original Article 45 to the status of a Fundamental Right. In view of this, the amended Article 45, providing for early childhood care and education, can still be legitimately read in conjunction with Article 21, thereby giving the children below six years of age a Fundamental Right that was snatched away by the 86th Amendment.

Before probing the impact of the neo-liberal agenda, let us acknowledge a rather discomforting reality. In spite of the significant flaws of the 86th Constitutional Amendment as pointed out above, it has taken the country more than five decades to accord education the status of Fundamental Right. In this sense, the amendment has indeed given the social movements a fairly powerful weapon to continue and broaden their struggle for education with equality, social justice and dignity. From this perception emerges a three-fold agenda viz. (a) struggle for realizing the full entitlement made available from this otherwise limited 86th Amendment; (b) using policy analysis (see the following Section) as a people’s tool of struggle, expose the political economy of the amendment with a view to reveal the class character of the Indian State as well as the neo-liberal agenda before the masses; and (c) extend the struggle to seek pro-people amendment of the 86th Amendment itself.

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