Sandeep Banerjee is the Delhi-based managing director and CEO of Edenred India After decades of neglect of a directive principle (erstwhile Article 45) of the Constitution of India to provide free and compulsory education to all children until the age of 14 years “within ten years of the commencement of this Constitution”, Parliament passed the Right to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. However, the Act limits the obligation of the State (Central and state governments) to children aged six-14 years. Moreover, it imposes an obligation upon all private — including unaided — schools to reserve 25 percent capacity in elementary school (classes I-VIII) for poor children in their neighbourhood. The RTE Act and its constitutional validity was upheld by the Supreme Court in its majority judgement in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (2010), delivered on April 12 this year. However, even two years after the RTE Act became law, there is no clear process to implement the 25 percent reservation mandated by s. 12(1)(c) of the RTE Act for economically weaker sections in private unaided schools, barring the state of Gujarat which has framed comprehensive rules. The conundrum is whether to fund students or schools. If schools are funded, the basis and proof of admission of poor neighbourhood children will remain a challenge. On the other hand, if students are funded, establishing whether the funds will be used for education by the child or her parents poses other challenges. Moreover, there are numerous delivery mechanisms for the transfer of funds — cheques, bank drafts, direct transfers or cash as not all beneficiaries will have bank accounts. In turn, writing cheques/drafts create administrative and logistics problems while cash transfers can be misused. Against this backdrop, the education/school voucher system is arguably the best solution for implementing the provisions of s.12(1)(c). School vouchers enable parents/students to use them as a financial instrument to easily access quality private education. Conceptually, a school voucher is a non-transferable, secure instrument that allows beneficiaries to pay tuition fees at a neighbourhood primary school in lieu of money. An increasingly popular methodology being adopted by governments worldwide to close the quality gap between private and government schools is through the issuance of school vouchers directly to socio-economically deprived children. The voucher submitted by a student to the school of her choice covers the full or partial cost of education at the school. Schools collect vouchers from students send them to a third-party service provider who credits the school’s bank account with the face value amount of the voucher with the bank debiting the account of the government. Under this scheme, leakages are controlled as transparency is maintained throughout the voucher ecosystem. The flow is managed by the third-party service provider as the voucher moves from the student to school, and back to the government. Under the current system, most state schools are accountable to the government. Adoption of the voucher system will make school managements directly accountable…
