2012 was another much-ado-about-nothing year for Indian education. With the beleaguered Congress-led UPA-II government floundering in a sea of corruption scandals and both houses of Parliament routinely disrupted as a bankrupt BJP-led opposition blocked all legislative business, the policy paralysis in New Delhi which plunged economic growth to a nine-year-low of 5.3 percent in 2012, also afflicted the education sector, stymying all reform initiatives. In a year of stasis wasted in petty politicking, the education and welfare of the world’s largest child population — 480 million — was relegated to the bottom of the national agenda. Three years after Kapil Sibal assumed office as Union human resource development (HRD) minister amid high hopes and great expectations, the plethora of education reforms he initiated are yet to translate into law. Like 2010 and 2011, 2012 ended dismally without a single education Bill being discussed and debated by Parliament. None of the 20 pending education Bills — 11 relating to higher and nine to primary-secondary education — have been legislated. Consequently, the National Commission for Higher Education and Research, Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations), National Accreditation Regulatory, Prevention of Malpractices, and Education Tribunals among other reformist legislation for Indian education are still hanging fire. The only ‘success’ of the Union HRD ministry in the recently concluded year, was validation of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) by the Supreme Court. In a split 2-1 verdict delivered on April 12 in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (Writ Petition (C) No. 95 of 2010), the apex court upheld the constitutional validity of the RTE Act, and particularly its controversial s.12 (1) (c) which makes it mandatory for all unaided (financially independent) private schools to admit 25 percent of children in class I or preschool if any, from among poor and socially disadvantaged children in their neighbourhood. However, the court exempted unaided minority and boarding schools from applicability of s.12 (1) (c). But while the government welcomed the judgement, the RTE Act which celebrated its second anniversary last April is still a non-starter as state governments struggle with interpretation of the judgement, funds constraints, shortages of teachers and infrastructure. Yet the highlight of Year 2012 was the ouster of legal eagle Kapil Sibal as HRD minister. In 2009, when the Congress-led UPA-II government was re-elected to office in New Delhi with an increased majority in the Lok Sabha, Sibal who had served in the UPA-I government as minister of science and technology, was appointed Union HRD minister with high hopes of sparking the overdue reformation of the country’s moribund education system. But instead of addressing the supply side of the supply-demand equation for superior K-12 and higher education by offering liberal incentives to domestic and foreign education entrepreneurs and universities to establish greenfield campuses, Sibal succumbed to the temptation of populist tinkering with quotas and administrative fiats to meet pressing demand for admission into high quality private schools…
