The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is no hyperbole to say that the well-intentioned Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, has been a disastrous experiment. Contrary to its avowed intent, its effect has been to deprive millions of children of their right to education by closing down schools.

Delhi’s AAP government has used Sections 18 and 19 of the RTE Act to justify closing all unrecognised private unaided schools, which are the low fee schools serving the poor and lower middle classes. Many other states have been doing the same, more quietly.

Section 18 mandates that private unaided schools must obtain government licence (“recognition”) by fulfilling the stipulated infrastructure and pupil-teacher ratio norms; Section 19 mandates the closure of schools that do not obtain recognition. State governments have added many further conditions for recognition.

While these strictures are supposedly quality related, in fact this inputs-focused approach is already discredited internationally in hundreds of studies and meta-analyses. And even national data show that raw learning levels of children in these schools are twice (in some states thrice) as high as in government schools.

In reality, there are less exalted reasons why state governments hide behind Section 19 to curb private education. Firstly, it is politically expedient. Section 12 of the Act (which obliges all private schools to give at least 25% of their seats to disadvantaged children) has accelerated the pre-existent trend of the emptying of government schools, embarrassing state governments. In 2015-16, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh alone closed about 24,000 government schools where total school enrolment had fallen below 10 students.

Such closures expose government incompetence, so it is expedient for states to forestall such embarrassment by suppressing the low fee unrecognised schools, coercing poor children to fill government schools which have higher teacher absentee rates. The horrendous consequences for children’s learning levels, and ultimately for productivity and national growth, are nowhere in the calculation.

Secondly, it is convenient for government to close private schools to avoid the burden of double-expenditure: maintaining empty school buildings and highly paid teachers (average per-pupil expenditure on salary alone is Rs 2,300 pm) in government schools and, again, reimbursing private schools for educating the children who have abandoned the government schools.

The reason for this unholy mess is that the RTE Act’s framers disregarded the evidence on the emptying of government schools, and were in denial about the pitiably low learning levels, which were driving parents to private schools. They merrily focussed on ensuring access to schooling, virtually redundant since enrolment was already 96% in 2009.

Paradoxically, Section 19 of the Act exempts government schools from penalties for violating the infrastructure norms, so it is not surprising that only 6.4% of them actually fulfilled the norms by 2016 (as per the HRD minister’s reply to Parliament in August 2016). Thus the Act shelters infrastructure-deficient government schools from closure, and applies double standards.

The Act has another monumental flaw: its Section 6 obligates state governments to establish neighbourhood public schools in all localities, legally binding states to create more of the kind of schools people have been abandoning. Official U-DISE data show that from 2010 to 2016, enrolment in government elementary schools fell by 1.8 crore (and in recognised private schools rose by 1.7 crore); average enrolment fell from 122 to a mere 103 pupils per government school; and the number of ‘small’ government schools (those with a total enrolment of ‘50 or fewer’ students) rose from 3,13,169 to 4,17,193!

The average school size in these 4.17 lakh schools was a mere 28 students per school making them monstrously unviable, both pedagogically and economically. The total teacher salary bill in these 4.17 lakh ‘small’ government schools was Rs 56,497 crore in 2016-17 (data from NUEPA). RTE’s insistence on creating more government schools when such schools have been rapidly emptying has led to grotesque inefficiency, and it constitutes the ruinous triumph of ideology over sense.

Many state governments have not implemented Section 12 of the Act to give poor children access to private schools. Uttarakhand and Maharashtra governments lament that they cannot afford to pay hundreds of crores rupees of reimbursements owed to private schools; Karnataka government is blaming Section 12 for the ‘privatisation of education’ since their government schools are rapidly emptying.

Some have called Section 12 anti-Hindu since it applies only to the non-minority (mainly Hindu) schools. Private schools are no happier with Section 12, complaining of low reimbursement rates, and of delays, deficits and corruption in the reimbursement process. They also fear political capture, official interference, loss of autonomy, and consequent reduction in quality of education.

The Act is premised on mistaken hunch-driven diagnoses and has prescribed the wrong (inputs-based) remedies, when the crying need is for accountability-raising reform that exposes government schools to the rigours of competition from private schools. Many countries have benefited by giving public funding (to government and private schools) as vouchers to parents, which empower the latter to hold schools accountable.

The imminent National Education Policy must boldly recommend the scrapping of the harmful Right to Education Act, 2009, and suggest policies based on national and international evidence on what has worked to improve children’s outcomes, rather than on ideology or experimentation. The stakes are high for crores of Indian children, and for the country’s growth and prosperity.