Article 21A and the Right to Education Act

In one line

Since 2010 a child between six and fourteen has a fundamental right to be schooled for nothing, and Parliament has decided that private schools help pay for it by giving away a quarter of their first class.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 21A, inserted by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act 2002, provides that "The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine." The obligation it creates is on the State, not on a school; but the words "in such manner as the State may, by law, determine" confer a new power, and the law made under that power is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, whose section 12(1)(c) requires every recognised school, including an unaided school, to admit in Class I at least twenty-five per cent of the strength of that class from the weaker sections and disadvantaged groups of the neighbourhood. That obligation binds unaided non-minority schools, and does not bind minority schools, aided or unaided.

Why the law has this at all

The Constitution promised universal elementary education in 1950, and it promised it in the wrong Part. Article 45, as originally enacted, was a directive principle: within ten years the State was to endeavour to provide free and compulsory education for all children until they completed fourteen years. Article 37 makes the whole of Part IV unenforceable, so nothing followed from the failure to do it.

The Court closed part of the gap by reading education into article 21, which is [Education Before Article 21A]. What it read in was limited, and the limit is the reason for the amendment. The Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill that became the Eighty-sixth Amendment, reproduced in the Pramati judgment, is candid about why. Of the goal in article 45 it says: "We could not achieve this goal even after 50 years of adoption of this provision." Therefore "an explicit provision should be made in the Part relating to Fundamental Rights".

Note the dates, because students get them wrong. The amendment is of 2002, and its own footnote in the Constitution records that it took effect from 1 April 2010, the day the Act of 2009 came into force. For eight years the article bound nobody.

The provisions

Article 21A, headed Right to education, is one sentence: "The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine."

The same amendment rewrote article 45, which now reads: "The State shall endeavour to provide early childhood care and education for all children until they complete the age of six years." The directive principle was not repealed. It was moved down to the years the new fundamental right does not reach.