MR Madhavan on the new Right to Education Bill

The UPA government recently introduced the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2008. The issue of the right to primary education in India, and the way it should be implemented through parliamentary law has been simmering for long, and has attracted commentary on this blog from its inception. Previous posts tracking debates over this issue can be found here, here and here. For a good resource on issues relating to education in general, see this section of the regularly updated website of India Together.

Today’s Indian Express carries an op-ed by MR Madhavan of PRS Legislative Research which seeks to highlight problematic aspects of the Bill. He begins his analysis by noting - as mentioned in the posts referenced above - that the Bill has been delayed since 2005 on the sticky issue of the sharing of costs between the centre and the states, which appears to have now been resolved. Madhavan provides a good summary of the main provisions and aims of the Bill:

The Bill states that all children between the age of six and fourteen years have the right to free and compulsory education. It mandates the government to set up neighbourhood schools within three years. It has provisions to provide out-of-school children to be given special training and then be admitted to the class appropriate for their age. It bans capitation fees and screening tests at the time of admission, failing or expelling any child till the completion of elementary education, and private tuitions by teachers. The Bill has specific provisions for private schools: a certificate of recognition and admitting at least 25 per cent of students belonging to the “weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighbourhood and provide free and compulsory education till its completion”. For such children, the government will provide reimbursement to the school to the extent of per-child expenditure for government schools.

He goes on to highlight five main points:

First, there appears to be lack of clarity on the delivery mechanism to provide elementary education for all children. … … … [The Bill] permits private schools, [but] places several conditions — on admissions (including the 25 per cent quota for weaker sections), minimum standards and policies on promoting students among others. ... ... ... Second, the focus appears to be on infrastructure and enrolment and not to see that the children who go to school actually learn. ... ... ... Third, the Bill provides for a uniform curriculum and evaluation procedure for elementary education within each state. This would limit the freedom of schools to determining the pedagogical content and methodology. Fourth, this Bill states that “it shall be the duty of every parent to admit his child to a neighbourhood school”. It, however, does not state the consequences of not following this duty. Also, it does not address the issues due to which parents do not admit their children. Fifth, the Bill requires each government and aided school to form a school management committee comprising local elected representatives, parents and teachers. This committee shall monitor the working of the school and the utilisation of grants given to the school. Evidence from Karnataka and several countries in Latin America and Africa on similar committees do not present any conclusive evidence of improvement in quality of schools.

His conclusion:

While the Bill attempts to lay down some guideposts, it remains an open question whether its provisions are sufficient to achieve this goal.

There is near unanimous agreement among policy makers on the crucial importance of primary education in India. To echo the point made by Tarunabh in the previous post, it is imperative that Parliament play its role of a genuine deliberative forum, at least on issues that go to the core of our constitutional democracy.

Update: The discussion in the comments section makes a reference to the text of the Bill necessary. Here is the full text of the Bill, from the PRS Legislative Research website.

Dhavan's response to Venkatesan

Dr. Dhavan has sent the following in response to Venkatesan's critique. I have his permission to post it on the blog:

"Wrong But Delightful: A Response to V. Venkatesan

- By Rajeev Dhavan

1. What a wonderfully provocative review!

2. The main debate is on whether the Parliamentary debates were fulfilling (see Book pp. 34-5). Clearly they were not.

3. It is the OBC bench that was utterly confused about whether the creamy layer applied to SCs and STs (see Book pp. 227-233) where the contradiction is shown.

4. The important aspect of Nagraj and Coelho is the caveat that, 50% reservations, creamy layer and compelling necessity are essential in respect of future actions even validity of the constitutional amendments is upheld (see Book pp. 238).

5. Alas, you have reviewed only the epilogue (see Book pp.199 ff) and my supposed reversal of roles, but not the book.

6. I love your writing – right or wrong!!"

Legislating the right to education

We have seen several drafts of the right to education Bill, none of them entirely satisfactory. One of the sticking points was allocating the costs between the Centre and the State governments. It seems that there is some movement on the issue, with the centre apparently agreeing to share the most of the financial burden. This article points out to the new interesting aspects of the Bill currently under consideration:
1. An obligation on all schools, public or private, to admit it least 25% of the students from the neighbourhood.

2. To gradually do away with the informal school system established under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and evolve quality indicators for recognizing a school.

A detailed analysis of the Bill is available on the PRS website. After all the attention to tertiary education in the reservations controversy recently, this glimmer of hope for primary education has not come too soon.

Early takes on the Ashoka Kumar Thakur case

As is perhaps to be expected when the Supreme Court issues four judgments in a single case, much of the early analysis of the Thakur case is very general and noncommittal. This may be because a close reading of the judgments and a good understanding of their contents is necessary, and most columnists haven’t yet had the time for that. We will all be watching out for that over the next few days.

While all the leading dailies had news-items about the judgments, and some also carried editorials, I thought that the Express was more categorical than others. The Express editorial on the Thakur case uses the same adjective for the case that is already becoming universal, calling it a “landmark case.” But, after briefly discussing the case, the Editorial moves onto the larger issue of higher education reform:

India is already running thin on meeting the aspirations of its young citizens for quality education. Take, for instance, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Each year, it takes just over 40 students for its MBBS programme. Whether half those seats are reserved or a quarter would not alter the fact that four dozen places annually for India’s best medical education is pathetically limited. So it is in different proportions at the IITs, the IIMs, our law schools and our universities.

These are shortages born of apathy, and they make salient the popular perception of a clash between equity and excellence, between meaningful equality of opportunity and merit. Those are false choices. Excellence is unattainable in a society with inequities. A programme of affirmative action would therefore be incomplete without expansion and improvement of our higher education system

While this is not a new point (several others have dwelt on this issue, and Justice Dalveer Bhandari’s judgment in Thakur also touches upon the overall issue of the educational system in India), it is perhaps worth remembering as we head into a debate on the merits of the ruling in the Thakur case. A recent policy paper which drives home this point in frightening detail is available here. Authored by Devesh Kapur and Pratap Mehta, the paper starts with a quote from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh describing the malaise that affects the higher education system, and proceeds to provide details and explain some of the reasons for the status quo. I would strongly recommend this paper to anyone who is interested in knowing some vital details about our current system of higher education in India.

Returning to the Thakur judgment itself, Pratap Mehta may well be among the first to provide a detailed analysis of the judgments, which appeared in his column in today’s Express. The piece will, by setting out what he understands to be the competing considerations weighed by the majority and dissenting judgements, probably help frame further debate and discussion about the judgment, and I suspect we will hear more about his analysis in days to come. Readers of the blog who are interested in this issue will do well to closely read the views of someone who has been an astute analyst of the issues that were central to the Thakur case.

My own immediate reaction to Mehta’s piece was that he may be attributing too much to the judges on either side of the divide he describes. It is not clear to me that the divisions between the majority and dissenters are so clearly marked, either in terms of their findings or their clearly delineated philosophical differences on ways to approach the issue of caste divisions in India. There isn’t a real, genuine dissent in this case, which is to me, the only real surprise in the case. Justice Pasayat’s seeming retreat from the language he employed in the order staying the OBC quota policy is striking (as was the measured tone adopted by Pratap Mehta in analysing the judgment as well, given his own role in the uproar over the granting of the stay on the OBC quotas issue last year). As Mr. Venkatesan suggests in a previous post, the judgments will have to be read closely to find out what the actual holding of the case is, to which a majority of judges agreed as a group. My sense is that there are partial dissents, sometimes on different issues, and understanding the full import of the case may require more deliberation and discussion.

The state of Indian legal education: An assessment of the NLS model and the importance of research

Harish's previous post highlights an important topical issue for the legal profession in India. Yesterday's issue of the Hindu carries an article by C. Rajkumar on the current state of legal education, which, while also relevant to the discussion initiated by Harish, deserves to be discussed separately. In his article, Rajkumar provides an assessment of the achievements and failures of the new, single-faculty law universities in India that have become the norm following the perceived success of the 'National Law School' model:

"There is no doubt that the establishment of the national law schools starting with the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bangalore successfully challenged this institutionalised mediocrity and succeeded in attracting serious students to the study of law. In fact, the study of law has received better attention among high school leavers in the country with the introduction of five-year integrated programmes. This has brought up new issues relating to pedagogy and approach to undergraduate studies for imparting legal education for high school leavers. The national law schools that have been established in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bhopal, and Jodhpur have all contributed in their own ways toward promoting excellence in legal education and research, particularly by attracting some of the brightest students to consider law as a preferred career option. But where these schools face significant challenges is in attracting faculty members who are top researchers in the field of law and can combine sound teaching methods with established track records of research. The lack of researchers in law and absence of due emphasis on research and publications in the existing law schools have led to the absence of an intellectually vibrant environment."

Rajkumar also sets out what he considers to be the biggest challenges for legal education in India, but it is his assessment of the NLS model which I found interesting and persuasive. Since several of us are products of that system, and we also have among our readers, current students in these new institutions, I wondered how others would react to Rajkumar's views.

Today's Indian Express has a column which complements Rajkumar's analysis on a larger point. Rajkumar asserts:

"Research can contribute significantly toward improvement in teaching and, more importantly, addressing numerous challenges relating to law and justice. If one were to look at the faculty profile of the world’s top law schools, one will find that there is great emphasis on research and publications among academics. Besides teaching, they contribute in significant ways by initiating and developing research projects in cutting edge areas, by professional contributions to international organisations, law firms and corporations, and by playing an important role in government policy formulation and promoting civil society activism. Law schools and academics in India need to go a long way in developing an institutional culture that promotes and encourages research that has the capacity to foster many positive changes in society at large."

The Express column, authored by C.P. Bhambri, is written as a reaction to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent speech announcing the policy decision to create 30 new Central universities. Bhambri argues that attention should instead be focused on disturbing practices in current institutions:

"The explanation for the prevalence of highly differential levels of academic performance among the universities, or within the same university, has to be found from within the university itself. First, the standards of a university depend on its teachers. None of the central universities has any evaluative criteria for the academic ranking of its faculty members or for identifying completely incompetent faculty members. Since universities do not have any internal mechanism of categorising faculty members as ‘performers’ and ‘non-performers, the net result is that every professor is treated as an equal, irrespective of performance and merit.

Second, professional bodies can play a very significant role in identifying the ‘meritorious’ and differentiating them from those ‘below standard’. But this is also not acceptable to universities and faculty members who start championing their ‘autonomy’ to counter the demand of ‘their accountability’. Third, the University Grants Commission, at the behest of the education ministry’s bureaucracy, has played havoc with procedures to determine the levels of performance of individual faculty members.

Any move to create new central universities should be informed by the experiences of existing central universities. But this is easier said than done. The teaching faculty has generally resisted any attempt to ‘differentiate’ on the basis of performance. The notion of a formal equality among individual staff members has given birth to the system of mechanical uniformity and this has, in turn, given birth to complete non-accountability on the part of faculty members."

Bhambri's critique is aimed at the established universities, and may not be applicable to the new law universities. The question to ask is whether the way out for the new law universities, as well as for the more established multi-disciplinary universities, is to replicate the model of the leading foreign universities where academic promotion is strictly tied with research and scholarship output. Some people in India have argued that this may not necessarily meet with the interests of the Indian legal community. Reactions?