The majority judgement of a three-judge bench delivered on April 12 substantially upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 and particularly its controversial reserved quota for poor neighbourhood children in private schools. Dilip Thakore report An uneasy silence has enveloped india’s estimated 80,000 private primary-secondary schools countrywide following the Supreme Court’s April 12 verdict in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (Writ Petition (C) No. 95 of 2010). Delivering the majority judgement of a three-judge bench comprising Justices Swatanter Kumar, K.S. Radhakrishnan and himself, Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia upheld the constitutional validity of the Union government’s Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, 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 in a ruling which has elicited sighs of relief in the country’s upscale, unaided (i.e financially independent of government) Christian missionary and ‘convent’ schools much favoured by India’s fast-expanding 300 million middle class, all three judges of the apex court exempted unaided minority and boarding schools from applicability of s. 12(1) (c). Although the Supreme Court has exempted independent minorities-run schools from this particular provision of the omnibus RTE Act — which enlarges the role of the Central and particularly state governments, despite their having spectacularly failed and neglected to raise standards of education or improve learning outcomes in the country’s 1.25 million government schools — the apex court’s April 12 verdict has most heavily impacted the parent communities of mid-rung private non-minority day schools which typically levy tuition fees of Rs.2,000-8,000 per student per month. With effect from the new academic year beginning June/July, they may well be obliged to subsidise the education of poor neighbourhood children admitted into their children’s schools. And this cross-subsidy burden in addition to the annual tuition fee increases because of inflation, will have to be borne by parents of children in non-minority, private unaided (DPS, DAV, Ahlcon, etc) for eight years until the poor neighbourhood children complete elementary education. For households with two-three children enroled in mid-rung English-medium day schools, the additional financial burden is likely to be considerable. Middle class resentment against s.12(1) (c) is likely to snowball once its financial implications for household budgets — already stretched to breaking point by unremitting inflation — begin to bite. “Over a decade ago responding to the invitation of the Delhi state government, we purchased two acres of land in Delhi/NCR at the government’s notified institutional price for schools and hospitals. Eleven years later, acceptance of this invitation has imposed an unforeseen financial burden on our school to admit 40 poor children from the neigbourhood into our preschool section which has an aggregate enrolment of 160. Although we admitted our first batch of poor neighbourhood children last year, we have neither received…
