Last week I was in the Tribal Welfare Ashram Girls Residential High School in Pedagaruvu village of Hukumpeta Mandal perched up in the eastern ghats of Vishakapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh. Talking to the bunch of Class 10 girls, I asked them what they wanted to become in life. Almost all wanted to be doctors and engineers and a few teachers. After probing them on their scholastic marks, I realised their dreams were indeed a bit distant considering they will compete with the very much more equal counterparts in rest of India.
That interaction set me thinking. What is freedom? It is the opportunity to choose from various options. But how can millions of such children in tribal and rural areas have options when a functioning government school itself is like finding a needle in a hay stack.
The recent draft of the “Right to Education Bill” that is expected to be introduced in Parliament mandates that 25 per cent of seats in private educational institutions be reserved for “weaker sections” of society. It also goes on to say that for each such admitted child, the “government shall reimburse to the school at a rate equal to the per-child expenditure in state schools/fully aided schools, or the actual amount charged per student by such school, whichever is less”. But where are the options for children from tribal areas or for that matter rural areas of Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
Naandi, the Hyderabad- based NGO that I run, works with children in over 2,000 government schools in six different states. None of them have an option but to attend the government school that often doesn’t have a teacher. In urban slums of Mumbai and Hyderabad, most of the children have come back to government schools as the private options they exercised offered no learning outcome.
So, the elephant in the room is the quality of learning guaranteed even in the single government school that the children can access. It is not about choices alone. The mushrooming private schools are equally notorious for offering the moon to lure poor parents. As far as learning levels are concerned, they offer no freedom to the children!
Having stated the above, I laud the RTE for its intent to liberate education. Barsavati Naik, a tribal girl in Knaker district of Chattisgarh, topped the district Class 5 public exam last year. This was of course possible due to the active monitoring of the school by the autonomous village education committee and the two hours of free private tuition she got from Naandi. Even then scoring 98 per cent marks for a first-generation learner was a tall order.
Thanks to RTE, when the story reached the babudom, they offered her the best of private residential school in the capital Raipur and she is one of the early liberated girls who is more likely to realise her dreams. This unique opportunity in the form of a right is indeed a historic milestone that 2010 offered to children of Independent India. Unless this landmark legislation is not backed with a minimum accountability to earning outcomes, this will well be like the legendary Ford’s quip to his team to have the freedom to make any colour of car as long as they were all black.

Manoj Kumar is chief executive officer of Naandi Foundation, an NGO