No move to make schools, teachers accountable, says Geeta Kingdon

A large proportion of India's population is engaged in agriculture, where parents need the help of their children well before they turn 18, says Geeta Kingdon

In the 1980s and 1990s, a sizeable proportion of school-age children in India was out of school. The Right to Education (RTE) Act was conceptualised to tackle this. However, by the time the law was enacted in 2009, the ground reality had changed: over 96 per cent of India’s children were already in school, although they were learning very little. Ten years on, in 2019, the quality of learning remains the primary problem of the country’s education system. And the blame for that falls strongly on the lack of accountability among government schools and teachers — the main ‘elephant in