The Right to Education Act, or RTE, has been justly criticised as forcing all of India’s educational establishments into a bureaucratic straitjacket. Its aim is laudable and urgent: to ensure that every Indian child has access to an education that meets certain minimum standards. But figuring out those standards is hard, and this is where Delhi’s tendency to obsessively centralise, divorced from the actual realities of education in the states, has tripped the RTE up repeatedly in its implementation.
One such pressing problem is the inability of some states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Manipur — to meet the teacher qualification norms written into the RTE: every school teacher must have either a bachelor’s degree in education, or a diploma. Naturally, these states must be given exemptions as soon as possible. West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa have already been granted exemptions, as they have never had such rules on the books, and compliance will take some time. In the government sector alone, India is short of seven lakh teachers; five lakh more teachers need to be appointed; and the number of untrained teachers is another seven lakh. Can we conceivably manage to train 20 lakh new teachers in the time we have available?
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