Delhi: Curious closures

Nowhere in India has passage of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) been more celebrated than in the national capital, which hosts the Union ministry of human resource development. Yet ironically, the state government of Delhi and the national capital region (NCR) has taken almost two years to notify the Rules for implementation of the RTE Act.This laidback and indifferent attitude of the state government towards education is also evidenced by the Delhi Statistical Handbook (DSH) 2011, issued by its directorate of economics and statistics, and formally released by chief minister Sheila Dikshit on November 3, last year. With education having been made a fundamental right by the RTE Act, an increase in the number of government schools in the national capital is a logical expectation. However, on the contrary in 2009-10, the number of government primary, middle and secondary schools declined by 112. According to DSH 2011, not only did the number of government-run schools in Delhi-NCR decline, so did the number of students enroled. Student enrolment in class I declined by 4 percent compared to 2008-09. This despite continuous migration into Delhi-NCR of an estimated 200,000-300,000 people annually — the majority of whom are migrant labour whose children would benefit from neighbour-hood government schools. With the shortage of classrooms nationwide estimated by D. Purand-eswari, Union minister of state of HRD, at 291,000 at the elementary level and 177,000 in secondary education, acad-emics and educationists are flummoxed by the phenomenon of the Delhi state government closing down government schools within its jurisdiction. Ashok Agarwal, a Delhi-based lawyer and promoter of Social Jurist — an equal education opportunity advocacy NGO — discerns an anti-poor cons-piracy in this phenomenon. The decreasing number of state government and municipal corporation schools is because of encouragement given to the promotion of private schools. During the past three years, the government has closed down around 100 schools — in some cases allotting the land for swimming pools and parking spaces. The state is surreptitiously withdrawing from school education to the detriment of children from the very sections of society that the RTE Act claims to serve, says Agarwal. On the other hand, Dr. Parth Shah, president of Centre for Civil Society — a Delhi-based think tank which has been aggressively propagating a school vouchers programme which will fund students, not schools — ascribes the incremental closure of government schools countrywide to appalling curriculum delivery and neglect of physical infrastructure which is turning parents away from them. The plain fact is that the state government finds it easier to shut down its schools than to improve teaching-learning conditions in them, says Shah. Caught between political rhetoric and apathy, the heaviest price of the state governments clandestine closure of its schools is being paid by bottom-of-the-pyramid SC & ST (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes) children. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of SC & ST children enroled in Delhi-NCR schools has fallen from 220,522 to 183,027 — a massive…