Right to Education

Right to Education
The RTE act has finally seen its day, it is an important step in achieving the objective of Universal education in the country. However like all other acts it will suffer from implementation issues on the ground.
1) How do we ensure that every child between 6-14 yrs goes to the nearby Govt or Private school. What is the mechanism by which we prod parents to send their children to school. In a lot of cases children above 8 yrs are also bread earners in the family. How will the family be fed are some of the issues.
2) Will the private institutions co-operate in reserving 25% seats for this category of students. I guess they hate to see these students in their premises. Private schools in India have become elitist over the years and I do not see them co-opting in this social development initiative. They will raise a whole lot of issues in terms of dilution of standards, rising costs of education, demand free hand in fixing fees in lieu of co-opting for this program etc.
Despite all the hurdles it is one social development program that needs complete attention of the district level administration in the country, schools should be audited on enrolment numbers from this year. They also should be audited on rejections and the reasons, this is more applicable to the private institutions. Schools should be penalized for unreasonable rejections and de-recognized for serial non-compliance.
Communities, states or other categories of the society which are lagging behind in literacy should be focus groups for this initiative, Bihar and UP are two states where this act should be implemented in full zeal. There needs to be country wide campaign at district and village levels bringing awareness about this program. I am sure at this time the programs objectives and implementation modalities are not known to many. This has been a bane in this country, useful laws are enacted but not enough follow up is there on implementation.
There should be an effective collaboration between the states, NGOs and other social bodies to ensure success of this program. Let us hope that this act will be talked about as the most successful social transformation initiative that has ever been rolled out in this country since independence.