The new government has before it a list of education agenda items that it must consider early in its tenure to make a substantial difference. Many of these were on the agenda in the last term too but they remained unfinished or unattended because there was no will to drive the required changes.

The first and probably the most important matter of political will is the Right to Education Bill. A Bill was first drafted under the NDA, which the UPA government trashed as soon as it came to power. The next five years were simply wasted in directionless redrafting and the editing of a new draft of 2005. After much pulling and pushing with inactivity in between, a draft was hurriedly finalised and tabled in the previous Lok Sabha in its final session. Today, there could be a temptation to pass the same Bill in a hurry to harvest a low hanging fruit. However, the Bill is extremely poor in addressing some of the most obvious and critical questions of elementary education. The Bill appears more focused on mostly Delhi-centric problems of 25 per cent reservations and less concerned about the larger issues such as quality of learning, accountability of the system to the child or the parents, academic support systems, and decentralisation. It is a case of a lot of detail with a lot of vagueness, which suits the bureaucratic mindset very well. What we need is a simple bill that indicates what is to be provided and what is the outcome expected with simplicity and clarity. Let the states work out the details that are consistent with such a Central law.

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