Right to education act is being hailed as the landmark legislation in providing free and compulsory education to all Indian kids and is touted to be the greatest achievement of the UPA. The propaganda surrounding it is so severe that many Indians, who are otherwise sane, normal and anti-congress seem to think it is the best thing ever. They seem to have internalised the propaganda of the media and politicians that Free and Education are such good words that if they come together they will make the world even better. In the end, everyone seems to care more about the buzzword “free education” and the snake oil sales pitch, “Right to Education”, than its fine points or harmful effects on the ground. Even a brief analysis of the fine texts of the Right to Education act will tell a common reader, not fully drenched in propagandist nonsense, on how evil this law is. The government which has failed to provide decent education infrastructure in 60 years is now hell bent upon destroying whatever little is left in private education sector.

Quantity argument

Most of the support for RTE comes from the middle and poor class Hindus, who think that RTE is great because it forces the large private schools to collect less money than they otherwise would. But those Hindus don’t seem to understand that the RTE does more harm to the low tier, low budget private schools than it does to cap what the large schools will collect as fees. For example, many people don’t know that one of the RTE stipulations in many states, is to pay the teachers a minimum salary as recommended by 6th pay commission of India. For example, the teachers should be played a salary of 23,000 Rs/month in Delhi just like their government school counterparts. But most of the private schools in towns, villages and in some cases cities, are low budget/low tier ones where the fees they collect is minimal, to the tune of 500 to 1000 Rs/month. Do you expect them to pay their teachers the salary in accordance with 6th pay commission or shut shop? Also, there is stipulation that the student teacher ratio should be 30:1. Given fees of 500 Rs/month per students and 30 students per teacher, it gives a monthly collection of 15,000 Rs. So how exactly will the small school run after paying 30,000 Rs/month as salary to its teachers while getting a fee of 500 Rs/month per student? So either the small schools should increase the fees to make a profit or close down.

But raising the school fees above a point in villages and towns would make the parents leave the schools in favour of undermanned and under quality government schools, which successive governments have completely ignored till now. This is exactly how the small schools are getting closed down in India, with some estimates suggesting closure of 10,000+ schools till now. If you take an average student population of 500 in each of these closed schools, it is a total of 50,00,000 (50 lakhs) students who are forced to study in a school which is below par what they were studying before RTE came into force. Thanks to Jholachaps sitting in AC offices, these poor students are now studying in rag-tag government schools instead of low tier/low budget but better private school. Think logically why would the parents pay 500 Rs/month for a private school if they did not think that those schools were better quality than the neighbouring government schools, which were giving free education anyway. Also, those 10,000+ closed schools would have turned into 100,000+ schools if not for the fact that RTE is not implemented properly in many states and many schools bribe RTE enforcing officers as that is the only way for them to stay afloat. This is one of the examples where corruption is better than following law at giving results when the law is ridiculously stupid. Is it any wonder that in many areas poor Hindu students are forced to be educated in madarassas, since the advent of RTE has forced closure of Hindu schools but has exempted all minority ones? Also, the same presstitutes who ran horror stories on big school fees and pimped for RTE are now completely silent on the destruction of the Hindu schools under RTE. In which country except India the closure of 10,000+ schools will not be news worthy and remain confined to internet and social media?

As per RTE, the government has made it mandatory for the private schools to admit 25% of its students free of cost. Since schools are a service provider just like any service provider, they need profits to operate as they are not in the business for charity. Since 25% of the students will get education for free and schools are not there for social service, so someone needs to foot the extra bill. Who else but the remaining 75% students and their parents had to bear this cost to subsidize the 25% freeloaders. To prevent hue and cry against it, the government being a good Samaritan that it is, decided to help the 75% as well by stating that government would take care of the cost of those 25%. But schools, just like any service provider like IT industry or retail shops, would have taken advantage of the free government subsidy for the poor students and increased the fees for the education, in the hope that Government would pay for it any way. Given this incentive problem the government decided to cap the maximum fee that schools can charge from their students. So you can see how government created layers of problems and then laws to solve the initial problem.

The above maze of laws has created a big misconception that since the government subsidises the private schools for the 25% costs so there should be no problem. But this government subsidy for the 25% is based on the average school fees for the average student and hence the government subsides for the poor/low tier/low budget schools would still be only 500 Rs/month which is inadequate to help them. The government subsidies will only help the top tier schools which are already collecting 30,000 Rs/year or more as fees. But even they are not so lucky as the government subsidy for the poor students do not reach these schools in time, sometimes running arrears to the tune of 3-4 years. So in the short term, those schools have to face big financial crisis. One can only imagine how great it would be to run a business with 75% of the revenues which you are supposed to get at some point but don’t know when.

Quality argument

This fairy tale sounds perfect until one looks at the effect such law will have on school quality. The middle class wanted the schools to be cheap and found this proposal very good as they all see the schools as rip-offs, even though they voluntarily send their kids to these schools after fully knowing their fees. But since the government has now put a maximum cap on the school fees, the schools cannot increase the quality of the education nor the amount of extracurricular activities since they can’t afford any new activities given this fee cap. This has lead to stagnation of the quality of education in the schools. So not only schools have closed down but RTE has also had an effect on school quality.

So the middle class parents, who are now better off due to income increase or are simply ready to sacrifice to ensure better quality of education for their kids, need to find a new school and this new school will invariably be a Christian school since Christian schools are exempt from the RTE. These Christian schools can charge whatever fees they want and pay whatever salary they want to their employees. They can invariably operate under a profit and hence afford new extracurricular activities in their schools like horse raiding, tennis, swimming etc and leave behind all other schools operated by Hindus.

Since the middle class Hindus are too cool, too selfish and too intelligent to live with their parents, the children of such middle class Hindus would be raised in Christian schools, without any one teaching them their actual tradition and history. These same children would then grow up to be Hindus in name only(HINO) and die hard liberals who would think Hinduism is bad and illiberal while corpse worship and ritualised cannibalism of Christianity is a great tradition. They would end up thinking how Secularism is synonymous with anti-Hinduism and progress, just like how most urban Hindus educated in convent schools think today. Is it any wonder that UPA under the evangelical waitress Sonia Gandhi decided to come up with this brilliant education bill and got ample support by the anti-Hindu and anti-India Marxist cabal as well as the Hindus in name only brigade of BJP? Now you know why the American with brown skin and Hindu name i.e. BJP chief minister Devendra Fat Novice (oops Fadnavis) is more than happy to educate his daughter in Christian convent school.

Would RTE be less evil if it includes minority schools?

Even if this act is implemented in such a way that the minority institutions are to be included under it, it still won’t help the lower middle class Hindu parents, who want their sons and daughters to study in a school where there is a better quality of education than the one provided in the government schools but cannot afford to send their children to fancy convent schools or big shot private residency type schools since the RTE act is especially vicious against the low-tier private schools. So instead of news like how Hindu students are forced to go to madarassas, there will be news on how Hindus students are now stacked in low quality government schools. Of course, the media would ignore that those Hindu parents and children had no option of low-tier, low budget private schools, which were closed off due to RTE act, just like how media is ignoring the closure of more that 10,000+ schools since the implementation of this act. Hence, the suggestion by the pathologically altruistic and brainwashed Hindu middle class that RTE is flawed only because of its non-applicability to religious minority institutions and can be fixed by enforcing it on minorities is equally stupid.

In short, RTE is a travesty of justice to the educational rights of poor Hindu children, designed specifically to kill off Hindu educational institutions and to re-establish the hold on the private school education which the Church had before liberalization of Indian economy in 1991. The subsequent level playing field for Hindu educational institutes was destroyed in one strike by RTE by masquerading under a wonderful buzzword called “Free Education”. The useful idiots i.e. Hindu middle class still can’t see how they have willingly placed this dynamite under their own civilization. So long as destructive policies like RTE are supported based on personal feelings of goodness, disregarding the destruction they can cause to the future of the very same people they are supposed to help, there is no hope for a better India. Closure of 10,000+ schools has already denied a better future to 50 lakh students, how many more lives are you willing to destroy for feeling good about yourself and stoking your ego with fake charity whose cost will be ultimately borne by the dark future of poor students?