The Padlock on the Schoolhouse Door

Rajesh Malhotra runs a small private school in Tigri Extension, a slum colony in Delhi. His father opened it twenty years ago; it teaches the colony’s children up to Class 8 for a few hundred rupees a month. Malhotra is frank about what it lacks: water runs short, so dry days mean two or three buckets, and the fire hose on the wall has nothing behind it. The parents have never complained. They pay for schooling the state hands out free nearby, which tells you what they make of the free alternative. The Right to Education Act gives a school like his 3 years to produce an all-weather building, a library, a playground of the prescribed size, and teacher salaries at government rates, or lose recognition and close. Malhotra’s school has held on.

In 2015 Parliament was handed a tally of 2,173 schools closed; and the padlocking has continued since then; this year Haryana barred 1,107 schools. The offence in nearly every case was physical: a playground too small, a corridor too narrow. Government schools with worse teaching records absorbed the displaced children and faced no reckoning.

The audit the act is owed

The law behind the padlocks is called, without irony, the Right to Education. It came into force in 2010 promising every child aged 6 to 14 a free seat. Sixteen years on, those children are owed more than applause; they are owed an audit, and three of its findings should trouble every Indian.

First, the Act closed schools that poor parents chose. A rickshaw driver who puts a third of his income into his daughter’s schooling knows what he is doing: he has weighed both schools and voted with his wallet. The Act overruled him and shut the classroom where she was learning to read.

Second, the learning crisis stayed put. The Annual Status of Education Report returns the same verdict at every round: roughly half of Class 5 children cannot read a Class 2 text, there has been no meaningful improvement in learning. The Act counted toilets and boundary walls; reading comprehension appears nowhere in its text.

Third, the government confessed. Parliament wrote automatic promotion until Class 8 into the law as compassion; the policy taught pupils and teachers that results were optional. In 2019 the same Parliament amended the Act to let states scrap it. A government that reverses the flagship provision of its own landmark law has printed a confession in the Gazette of India.

What the act got right, with an asterisk

The Act has real achievements. Enrolment, girls’ above all, is near universal, and the 25 per cent quota for disadvantaged children in private schools ranks among the largest school-integration experiments on earth. Each carries an asterisk: enrolment had passed ninety per cent before the Act arrived, and the state hollows its own quota by paying reimbursements late or never, which shrinks the seats on offer. The state also taxes the right it proclaims. Coaching classes, the survival kit of millions of pupils, carry 18 per cent GST; notebooks are taxed too. The vote goes untaxed. A fair trial goes untaxed. Education, declared a right of the same rank, funds the treasury, and the government should decide which claim it believes.

Fund children, not buildings

A better way exists, and it abandons no child. Fund children rather than buildings: let public money follow the pupil, by voucher or direct transfer, to whichever school her parents choose. Judge every school, government schools included, by one standard, whether its children can read, write and count, and publish the results. Close schools for failed teaching alone. The rickshaw driver knows his daughter’s school better than an inspector with a measuring tape.

The padlocks went on in the name of protecting children, and someone should ask the pupils who lost their seats what they were protected from. Sixteen years of this Act have given India’s children the right to an education. They are still waiting for the education.