Grave human rights violation

The Congress-led UPA-2 government in New Delhi must be applauded for passing the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill which could become an Act of Parliament any day now. This legislation was long overdue and will undoubtedly benefit millions of Indias children. However the fate of 30 million children who are disabled or differently abled remains dismal, as they have been left out of the purview of the Bill. This means that children with disability arent included in the 25 percent reservation in class I of private neighbourhood schools, which has been given to weak and disadvantaged children as defined in s.2 (d) of the Bill.Those of us who have devoted our lives to the education of disabled children, and have shown that they can eminently benefit from education, are in a state of shock and disbelief to find that the RTE Bill has not included them in its definition of disadvantaged children. This despite assurances of the prime minister and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Although the media — especially NDTV and the Indian Express — have highlighted this lacuna of the RTE Bill, until the Act is amended, or children with disability are notified as disadvan-taged, their education remains a grey area. In response to our concerns and apprehen-sions, Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal says that disabled children have been included as per the proviso in the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995. According to him, this provision automatically extends the right to education to disabled children as defined by the PWD Act. This is not correct. In fact, it dilutes the right to education of disabled children. Mainstream education can be denied to disabled children because of the use of terminology such as appropriate environment (which could be interpreted as education at home!) in the PWD Act. The stark truth is that the PWD Act does not endow children with disability the fundamental right to free and compulsory education as does the RTE legislation. It does not guarantee the protection of the 93rd Amendment to the Constitution which includes ‘education for all to children with disability which took us three decades to achieve when the Amendment was tabled in Parliament! Besides the PWD Act has no clear and specific guidelines for implementation with effective dates, deadlines, alternate arrangements, temporary reliefs etc. To this day there are many barriers to inclusive education for disabled children in India. Lack of infrastructural support and funding has ensured that during the past 60 years since independence, a mere 2 percent of children with disabilities have been included in mainstream education — a shocking illustration of institutionalised discrimination. And now following exclusion from the RTE Act, children with disabilities have fallen into the cracks between the PWD Act and the RTE Act once again. Therefore there is an urgent necessity to amend the RTE Bill so that all children (disabled and non-disabled) have a fundamental right to education under s.3 of the RTE Bill without any cross-referencing to the PWD Act…