The Right to Education Act (RTE) is not a non-starter. It is a bad starter. In Maharashtra, the government doesn’t know whether it is coming or going and whether private schools will implement it tamely or demur.

In fact, there has been a huge operational setback for most states implementing the Act. Apart from grappling with infrastructural and logistical hurdles, they are trying to get private schools to toe the line and failing. The Act empowers the state to act against truant schools but that option is suspect, given the political clout of many schools. There seems to be a survival problem with RTE.

While many issues have been highlighted, one hasn’t got its fair share of media attention. Private schools are keen to junk the Act because it puts the burden of paying the fees for the 25% poor students. Now, no school is gallant enough to take the blow on its chin. The schools will simply transfer the financial burden of this lot to the 75% fee-paying students.

All those sending their children to private schools are not necessarily rolling in wealth. Barring a Bombay Scottish here or a Dhirubhai Ambani there, most of them are middle-class parents struggling to give their child a decent education. These people are being told to pay for their child’s classmates too. Out of every four school-going children, three pairs of parents will pay for the fourth.

This doesn’t mean a one-third burden of the child, as the state will chip in with some money but still, the amount is considerable for a middle-class family. The state will only pay the cost it incurs on a child in a public school.

So, if the annual fee for a child in a primary school is Rs1 lakh/year and the state pays Rs10,000 for the economically weaker child, the staggering difference will have to be borne by other parents. Though it is not explicitly spelt out, it stands to reason that the schools will not pay out of their pocket.

There is no doubt each one of us has a social liability towards the poor. This fact cannot be over-emphasised. But this liability is universal and shouldn’t be imposed on one section just because it has school-going children. It is one thing for fee-paying parents to want to shoulder this responsibility and quite another to force them to.

Ideally, the state should pay the full cost for the weaker section students in a private school. If it does, the burden automatically gets transferred to the taxpayer. This seems fair as we pay taxes in proportion to our income and expenditure. However, this option gets complex and controversial because of the vastly varying fee structures of schools. Clearly, the answer is not simple but somewhere out there.

The law is a visionary’s delight but far from a panacea. In its reformatory fervour, it pole-vaults to the other side of the spectrum in one sweep, instead of going step-by-cautious-step. Nor, while fixing the form, does it address the content of our education system, which is self-serving and destructively competitive. The ideological grooves that circumscribe our educational format leave no room for the vital factors of social, cultural and community responsibility. It pits everyone against each other in an atmosphere that creates conflicts at the individual, class and societal level.

There is more to reform than good intentions. One hopes the Act does not create more problems than it seeks to resolve.