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SC verdict has exposed its unpreparedness in implementing RTE Act

The recent Supreme Court verdict leaving unaided minority institutions out of the ambit of the Right to Education Act has caught the State government off guard, exposing its lack of preparedness in implementing the Act.

For, the government is clueless about identifying ‘unaided minority institutions’. As a result, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA), which has corroborated school details only under the categories ‘government’, ‘management’, ‘aided’, and ‘unaided’, is now forced to take up a new exercise to certify institutions as ‘minority’ and ‘non-minority’.

On Monday, the SSA wrote to the 34 Deputy Directors of Public Instruction (DDPIs) in the State asking them to immediately start the process of identifying minority institutions and classifying them as either ‘linguistic’ or ‘religious’ minority institutions.

The DDPIs will now write to the 204 Block Education Officers asking them to put the data together. The circular also asks the DDPIs to include the date the institutions were registered.

Officials said the exercise was imperative for the department to ascertain the budget it has to set aside under the RTE.

Presently, the department has fixed Rs 11,008 (maximum) as the reimbursement cost the government needs to pay per child to schools which have to take in 25 per cent of the students from the economically weaker sections.

Reimbursement cost

Officials said the total reimbursement cost for the 10,961 unaided institutions in the State would be a little over Rs 90 crore.

The SSA estimates that around 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the total unaided institutions will come under the minority category. But nobody knows this for sure. Not even the linguistic or religious educational associations/federations in Karnataka.

The institutions seeking the minority status are registered either under the Karnataka Societies Registration Act or the Karnataka Public Trust Act. There is no provision under the law to register as a minority institution.

However, the Societies or Trusts can claim the minority status by getting an endorsement to a statement detailing that the majority members on its board are minorities.

Mohammed Imtiaz, chairman of Karnataka State Minority Educational Institutions Management Federation, said it was unfortunate that the government had no mechanism to identify minority institutions.

“We estimate that there are around 6,800 minority institutions in the State. Of these, around 2,000 are in Bangalore City. But these are rough estimates,” he said.