Exactly six years ago today, the Right to Education (RTE) Act came into force. It was enacted with the good intention of providing free and compulsory education to the children of India. But it suffers from three major flaws that undermine its very purpose, and cause harm to education in the country.

Firstly, ironically in the name of the right to education, it has led to the closure of a large number of private schools, depriving children of their right to education. Secondly, contrary to the hope that the Act would rehabilitate the tottering government school system, the standards of education have further fallen since the implementation of the Act. Thirdly, the Act has raided the autonomy of private schools and foists the same ruinous official/political interference on private schools that has been so injurious to the running of government schools.

Many state Rules and Government Orders – issued in the name of implementation of the RTE Act – prescribe norms, standards and conditions for private schools’recognition which are overly restrictive or infeasible, especially for low-fee private schools, which are the vast bulk of private schools in the country. As a result, many schools are being forced to close down. Eight thousand private schools are estimated to have closed by 2013. This is tragic.

The low-fee private schools produce higher learning than state schools and at a fraction of the per-pupil cost of state funded schools. Not surprisingly, there has been an exodus from the dysfunctional government schools towards private schools: in rural India alone, the enrolment share of private schools rose from 16% to 31% in the short period 2006-14 (Annual Status of Education Report, or ASER).

If private schools did not exist, the entire financial burden of elementary education provision would fall on government, in whose schools per-pupil cost is upto 20 times higher than low-fee private schools. Since government relies heavily on private schools to deliver elementary education to about 50% children of the country (31% rural and perhaps 80% urban), it needs to take a facilitative rather than a punitive approach, perhaps with subsidies to low-fee schools to help them become RTE compliant. Another idea is to make government recognition of private schools dependent on their students’learning achievement levels rather than solely on physical infrastructure norms, as done by Gujarat.

Secondly, implementation of RTE has dashed the hope that it will redeem the failing government school system. RTE’s best idea for improving schools is to insist on physical infrastructure being good. While this is desirable in itself, research does not support this as a means of improving pupils’outcomes. In any case, Section 18 of the RTE Act exempts government and aided schools from compliance with the physical infrastructure norms.

The Act is completely silent on the things that really matter: teacher effort, teacher accountability and student learning outcomes. Sadly, far from improving child learning, year-on-year decline in students’learning outcomes could not be arrested in the five years since implementation of the Act (annual ASER reports).

Improving government schools’quality remains important since they would have to provide education to crores of poor children even if 100% seats of all private schools were given over to poor children. While teacher accountability and child learning outcomes are admittedly the more difficult things to fix, they are the proverbial bull that needs to be taken by its horns.

Thirdly, RTE is destroying the autonomy of private schools. The 11-Judge bench of the Supreme Court, in the TMA Pai Foundation versus State of Karnataka case, observed that “the essence of a private educational institution is the autonomy that the Management must have in its management and administration”.

Even the compassionate high-fee private schools, that have traditionally always admitted poor children for free or on heavy fee concession, do not like centralised admission of disadvantaged children into 25% of their total seats under the RTE Act because they are afraid of government interference. They fear that political and official meddling – which comes with accepting government reimbursement money – will ruin whatever quality of education they have hitherto been able to maintain in an otherwise bleak educational landscape.

Some of the ways in which private school autonomy is invaded are as follows: insistence on compliance with infeasible norms and standards, with menaces of fines; harassment/extortion on the pretext that government recognition has not been obtained; interference during the centralised admission of “disadvantaged’children, especially via officials sending the children of their favoured groups and non-poor SC/ST/OBC children for admission; unrealistic and rigid prescriptions regarding school fees to be charged from students; and inordinate delays of two to three years in reimbursement without compensation.

Schooling without learning is meaningless, and is leading to the pitiable squandering of the potential of millions of Indian children every year. The consequences, in terms of lost social and economic progress, are horrific. A new Right to Quality Education Act is desperately needed, with evidence-based provisions, to ensure children’s learning outcomes, teacher accountability and enabling partnership with the private school sector.