The Right to Education Act, 2009 introduced during tenure of former prime minister Manmohan Singh has been a mixed bag of success and failures, according to education experts.
Singh's government introduced the Right to Information Act, empowering citizens with access to government information.
The RTE Act aimed to provide free and compulsory education to children aged six to fourteen years, ensuring education as a fundamental right.
The central government had last week notified implementation of a major change in the RTE Act, doing away with "no-detention policy" for class 5 and 8 students.
"RTE is a mixed bag of failures and successes. RTE admissions in unaided private schools is a landmark success in providing education to the children belonging to disadvantaged group and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) of society and has become very popular. Everyone wants to send his ward to private schools under the EWS category," said Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer and education.
"The objective of RTE was to bring all school-aged children including disabled children in full-time regular schools but it has utterly failed. Government schools countryside have slowly closed down and enrolment of students has gone down."
"Unfortunately, RTE is yet to achieve its constitutional goal that all children without exception go to regular school and receive quality education. It is still a dream for the children of masses," he added.
According to Leena Bhattacharya, a former Global Education Monitoring fellow at UNESCO, other than in north and central India, the RTE Act resulted in an improvement in the primary school completion rate of low-income children in all the other regions. -- PTI
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