When will the Right to Education Act be notified?
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COMMENTS 
Four months after it was passed in Parliament, no date has been fixed for implementation of the Act making education free and compulsory for children aged 6-14
Seven years after the Constitution was amended in 2002 making free and compulsory education for children in the age-group 6-14 a fundamental right, and four months after the Right to Education Bill was passed in Parliament, both legislations are yet to be notified.
Notification is a mandatory step that gives the exact date from when the law comes into force.
The human resources development (HRD) ministry is said to be still working out the costs involved in implementing the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act; it has tentatively pegged the cost at Rs 1.71 lakh crore for five years. Since state governments need time to make the necessary budget allocations and put the infrastructure in place, early notification would have helped them begin the process.
The RTE Act also envisages certain reforms in the system such as maintaining a teacher-student ratio of 1:30, setting up school management committees, and introducing continuous evaluations instead of the examination system. State governments could have begun working on these too had the Act been notified.
Writing in the Financial Chronicle, Arun Nigvekar, former chairman of the University Grants Commission, says that despite the delay in notification, state governments should start putting the requirements of the RTE in place.
“Governments, state and central, must realise that these reforms cannot happen overnight by using a magic wand. It requires enormous effort and commitment at several levels, right from the panchayat to taluka to district to state level.”
Nigvekar argues that the state education ministries are “still not alarmed by the magnitude of the work required. They are just waiting for issuance of the notification, as if that alone would resolve every issue”.
He gave the example of the fiasco over the education satellite project launched in 2004. “The entire world hailed it as India’s novel approach to enhancing access and quality in education. The HRD ministry, which was aware of the launch, could have planned its use. However, it started work on the use of satellites the same year. The net result: even after six years of its existence in space, the potential of education satellites is under-utilised and we have lost an excellent opportunity to transform our education system.”
Source: Financial Chronicle, January 17, 2010