A special committee chaired by Union minister of state Kapil Sibal to give teeth to the Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2004 has recommended that 25 percent of pre-primary and class I students in India’s globally respected private schools should be from disadvantaged groups. Dilip Thakore reports Submitted to the Union ministry of human resource development on June 30 this year, the implications of the revolutionary recommendations of the Report of the CABE (Central Advisory Board of Education) on Free and Compulsory Education Bill and Other Issues Related to Elementary Education have obviously not yet impacted themselves upon the boards of management and teachers of India’s 75,000 private schools which have an estimated 8 million of the country’s best and brightest students on their muster rolls. When the under-debated recommendations of the special CABE committee chaired by Union minister of state for science and technology and ocean development Kapil Sibal to give teeth to the Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2004 are absorbed by private school managements and the nation’s powerful middle class for whom high quality private school education for their children is a God-given fundamental right, a violent round of protests and litigation are inevitable. Constituted by Union minister of human resource development Arjun Singh to “suggest draft of legislation envisaged in a new Article 21A of the Constitution” ( viz, “the State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law determine”) enacted following the 86th amendment to the Constitution in 2002, the Sibal Committee’s report makes several important recommendations which if approved by the HRD ministry and Parliament are likely to radically transform elementary education in India. “Right to education also implies that it is the State’s obligation to remove whatever obstacles — social, economic, academic, linguistic, cultural, physical etc — which prevent children from effectively participating in and comple-ting elementary education of satisfactory quality,” says the committee’s report while elaborating the principles which guided its deliberations. Accordingly the committee has recommended that the Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2004 (FCEB 2004) which when enacted by Parliament will give effect to the proposed Article 21A, should confer the right to “full-time education of satisfactory and equitable quality in a formal school” upon every child (defined as a boy or girl between six-14 years of age in the Bill) who should be “enabled to complete elementary education”. Moreover taking cognizance of the reality that “one major reason why it has not been possible to universalise elementary education all these years is the dysfunctionality of the delivery system”, the committee has recommended several provisions for “greater decentralisation and accountability” of the elementary school system to be incorporated into the Bill (see box p.28) However the recommendation of the Sibal Committee which is certain to generate storm within the inner councils of India’s private schools as well as within the drawing rooms of middle class India is one which endorses and expands s.35 of FCEB 2004. This section of the proposed Bill…
