Research Paper On The Right To Education Act

The Right to Education (RTE) Act came into being in 2009. It had failed to clearly take into account the rights of the differently-abled children for an inclusive education at the time of its drafting. After the persistent demand by the disability rights activists and the civil society groups and after many rounds of drafting and redrafting some of their demands were included in the Act. The Right to Education Act makes free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school a ‘right’ for every child between the ages of six to fourteen years. The Act mandates that no child be held back or required to pass an examination until she or he completes an elementary education. The Act also mandates that all schools, whether public or private, reserve

The “how” and the “where to” pertaining to some of the provisions in the Act remain ambiguous in this otherwise significant enactment. The Act is not very clear on accountability and financial responsibility. However, the provision of neighbourhood schools within a distance of 1 km is indeed a welcome step towards removing distance as a barrier for attending schools. The provision is expected to benefit the differently-abled children, as they will be able to attend schools with the minimum discomfort and their parents also do not need to bear the transport cost to send their children to school. Though the Act is a welcome step towards providing inclusive education to differently-abled children but how far is it going to be effective in real terms is yet to be seen.

Identification of Differently-abled Children and Responding to their Educational

The inability to ensure that children with disabilities receive effective educational services results in their exclusion from the labour market and other forms of marginalization and dependency. In many countries, that also includes some of the developed countries like Canada, Australia, U.K educational establishments are physically inaccessible to differently-abled people and do not provide adequate support. This is also true for India. Even though various efforts have been made in the past, both the rates of educational participation and outcomes of education, remain very poor for children and young adults with disabilities. Illiteracy rates for this group remain much higher than the general population and school attendance continues to lag behind that of non-differently-abled peers. This is also evident that people with disabilities have much lower educational attainment rates with more than 50 percent of non-literate population in the studied states (Table 3). The findings further show that less than 15 percent of the differently-abled children have completed primary education in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and it is less than 10 percent in the other three states, namely, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. This suggests that children with disabilities rarely progress beyond primary