Forum starts campaign to check RTE compliance

BHUBANESWAR: RTE Forum, a platform of national education networks, educationists and voluntary organizations, has started a campaign to check the implementation of the Right to Education Act, 2009, to ensure quality education in schools.
The law provided for a time span of five years to ensure that all schools in the country complied with a set of norms and standards.This period will end on March 31, 2015.
"With only 150 days left for the deadline, we have launched a campaign to ensure quality education. During the campaign, we will push for the implementation of the RTE Act at the national, state and district levels," said state convener of RTE Forum Anil Pradhan.
By 2013, only 10 per cent of the schools were compliant with all the norms and standards of the RTE Act and now, five years after the Act came into being, most schools continue to default on all the deadlines, Pradhan said. The forum has been tracking the implementation of RTE at the ground level since 2009 and published several reports on it.
The campaign 'Claiming education for every child' will connect millions of people across the country including school management committee members, teachers, working masses and likeminded intellectuals and collect their voices to strengthen the government school system with improvement in the quality of education.
After the campaign, the forum will submit a memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and collect 10 lakh grievances from across the country against the violation of provisions and the spirit of the RTE Act. These grievances will be submitted to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) and the state commissions concerned.
The forum also alleged that despite a need to open more schools, more than one lakh schools were closed or merged or had been handed over to corporate foundations. "The strong private-school lobby has also been trying to influence the government machinery for policy changes and blaming government schools for imparting poor quality education," said national convener of RTE Forum Ambarish Rai.
The forum has also submitted a 10-point charter of demands to the Prime Minister, including a regulatory framework for private schools with minimum norms, rolling out nationwide child mapping and tracking systems, special training for all children out of school, filling up all teacher vacancies by qualified, trained and regular teachers and empowering parents.
In Odisha, the implementation of the Right to Education Act is quite poor with 35 per cent government schools having no proper toilets for girls. A meager 29 per cent of schools have playgrounds and 40 per cent schools have boundary walls, according to the Annual Status of Education Report 2013. The dropout rate among high school students is as high as 16.49 per cent and on an average, around 3.41 per cent for children of all classes.