From April 1 this year, right to primary education became a Fundamental Right. Is it significant that April 1 was chosen as the date on which this very vital right would come into force? I grew up with the tradition of celebrating April 1 as All Fool’s Day, a day when we played pranks on everyone else and felt thrilled when we were able to fool someone.

I read many lofty proposals. The Act makes it compulsory for every child to attend primary school and receive education as a right. The government and many well meaning NGOs have failed to provide this to children in the metropolitan and urban centres, let alone in the vast wasteland of our remote, undeveloped, impoverished interiors. Where children still have to travel more than 20 to 25 km each way to reach a school.

I work with an NGO in Kolhapur called AVANI. AVANI works with children of migrant labourers, nomads of modern times who travel relentlessly throughout the year in search of jobs. Since the parents travel looking for jobs, their children travel with them. In the Kolhapur region they find work on the seasonal brick kilns and during harvest time as labourers hired to harvest sugarcane. Brick kiln work lasts for six months, the families live on the site of the kilns. The economy of the family is so fragile that to put food in every mouth every pair of hands has to earn, so apart from the infants everyone works, there is rampant exploitation and abuse, a child is paid Rs 17.50 to haul 1,000 bricks on its head. AVANI has been relentlessly campaigning to stop the exploitation of children, it has now managed to convince a few owners of kilns to allow them to establish classrooms on the side of the brick kilns so that it can provide basic education to the children of the labourers and stop them from being used as cheap labour. AVANI volunteers teach under trees, under makeshift huts made of nothing more than a bamboo frame covered with a few rags or rusty tin sheets. AVANI receives no aid or support from the government. Now that primary education has been made compulsory and a fundamental right, will these children be empowered to demand that they get educational facilities, which will cater to the unique circumstances, which the poverty of their family has created? How will the government provide education to the children of migrant labourer families who are constantly on the move between Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka? This is just one example, this situation exists in every state and region of our nation.

Last year I was invited by a Bangalore-based NGO SACRED Trust, founded and run by V N Vasudev, The trust imparts free computer education to both village children as well as adults. SACRED Trust also sponsors and organises science Olympics among students of rural schools. Last year, I was invited to distribute prizes to the victorious students at the Government Higher Primary School in Kankapura, a small hamlet in rural Karnataka not very far from Bangalore. I spent the whole day at the school seeing the science experiments and projects created by children of government schools from the district. A young Muslim girl, I forget her name, appointed herself as my chaperon and guide and was all the time with me. Before I left, she told me that she needed my help, she said her parents were going to remove her from school, I asked her why? She said she was in the 8th grade and this school only had classes up to 8th grade. The school with grade 9 and 10 was about 5 km away in the neighbouring village. Her parents were refusing to allow her to commute daily to attend that school. I asked the school principal why the school in Kankapura could not have two more grades? He told me that there was a rule that if there was a school offering the two higher grades within 10 km of each other both could not have the two higher grades, so although they had applied many a times, permission was refused by the state education department, even though children were dropping out. Will the right to education change this? Will such absurd rules be scrap­ped? There are many regions of our nation where children have to travel more than 50 km each way to reach the examination centres to appear for their std X and std XII board exams, Will the government provide facilities so that every child will have primary education facilities within walking distance from home?

I read with amusement that the government is planning to make it compulsory for non-aided private schools and those run by minority communities to enrol poor and underprivileged children. Bandra East and the Bandra Kurla Complex have many hutment col­onies and some very poor families live in them. Will the central and state governments please tell me if they will make it compulsory for the Dhirubhai Ambani School to enrol children from these families? Even if they do, would the underprivileged children be able to cope with their elite and pampered peers?

So, who is the government fooling?