Popularly known as the rte quota, the compulsory admission of children from poor neighbourhood households into private non-minority day schools under s. 12 (1) (c) of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 has always been a sore point in Karnataka. Under this provision, private unaided schools — other than minority and boarding schools exempted by the Supreme Court in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India (2012) — are obliged to reserve 25 percent of seats in class I for children of households in their neighbourhoods earning less than Rs.3.5 lakh per year. Admissions are based on an online lottery system conducted in May every year and the state government reimburses the tuition fees of students thus admitted to the extent of the average expense incurred per student in its own schools, which varies between Rs.8,000-16,000 per year. For the poor, whose only alternative is dysfunctional government schools defined by English aversion, crumbling infrastructure and multi-grade classrooms, RTE quota seats in private schools are like manna from heaven. In the academic year 2017-18, the state government’s education ministry received 228,000 applications for 158,000 seats under the quota. However, confronted with the problem of a continuous exodus from its malfunctioning government primaries — even poorest households prefer to send their children to low-fees ‘English medium’ private budget schools (many of them illegal) than to free-of-charge English-averse state government schools — the education ministry is set to tweak the rules for admission under s. 12 (1) (c). As per a proposal ready for submission to the Cabinet in November, the department of public instruction (DPI) will allot free-of-charge seats in private schools only after seats in neighbourhood government and aided schools are filled up, a model followed by the neighbouring state of Kerala. Moreover, the cash-strapped Congress-JD(S) coalition government, which was voted to power in May this year, has reportedly become aware that RTE reimbursements which aggregated Rs.22 crore in 2012-13 for 49,282 children and rose to Rs.226 crore for 414,000 children in 2016-17, are a burden on the exchequer. However this proposal to deny a large number of under-privileged children free-of-charge entry into English-medium private schools has angered parents and students in poor neighbourhoods of well-furbished private schools which they regarded as the only option for their children to improve their lives. The Karnataka government’s rationale that neighbouring Kerala follows this system has become a subject of debate for social activists in Bangalore who argue that the qualitative difference between government and private schools in Kerala — India’s most literate state and highly ranked on every human development index — is minimal, unlike the situation in Karnataka in which three private co-ed day schools are ranked among the Top 10 in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2018-19 cf. none in Kerala. However, in the government day schools category, five schools in Kerala are ranked among the Top 10 cf. one in Karnataka. “Thus far, the state government had abdicated its responsibility…
