‘Education budget must be increased for better implementation’

Initiatives so far to identify outofschool kids have been conducted in a haphazard manner. Education budget needs to be increased. It needs to be at least 6% of the GDP. Unless teachers grasp the spirit of the RTE Act, they won’t be able to do it justice.

Falling education budgets, poor training to teachers and haphazard initiatives to ensure children come to school — Hemangi Joshi, the education manager at Narotam Seksharia Foundation, a not-for-profit, and a member of the Right to Education Forum, talks to HT about the issues plaguing the Right to Education Act and the steps that can be taken to ensure the landmark Act is implemented better. Even the latest BMC budget for education was a disappointment. We need to make education a priority.

Enrolment levels are high, but the children who are not in school belong to marginalised and disadvantaged groups.

This includes nomadic, tribal and differently-abled students. We cannot afford to ignore them saying a majority of the kids are already in school.

The initiatives taken so far to identify out-of-school kids have been conducted in a haphazard manner. They lack long-term vision and planning. We need a concrete, well thought

out five-year programme.

Merely holding competency tests isn’t sufficient. Their results need to be made public, so schools can work on them and improve. Unless individual schools know where they stand compared to others, they will not be able to work on their performance.

Unfortunately, right now, the government’s focus is not on training. Unless teachers grasp the spirit of the RTE Act and the policies started under it, they won’t be able to do justice to the reforms.

It is important to ensure that teachers share the same vision as the Act.

The idea behind SARAL was good. The amount of data the government can collect through this project is huge. And, it can be used to design policies and understand gaps like never before.

Unfortunately, the programme has failed to launch in the way we hoped. It is facing a lot of technical troubles and has become a burden for teachers. The data collected through SARAL is also not being made public by the government. It is yet another failed attempt.