RTE is a waste, will hit KG-to-PG, says K Chandrasekhar Rao

Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has termed the Right to Education Act as “waste”. Speaking in the Legislative Assembly on Monday, he said the previous UPA government had brought RTE Act without doing proper homework.

Mr Chandrasekhar Rao found fault with RTE Act mandating 25 per cent quota for poor students in private schools. He said if this is implemented, state-run schools will face closure and government teachers will become jobless.

He also said that RTE was obstructing the plans of TRS government in implementing “KG-to-PG free education scheme”.

“Education sector has been facing several problems not only in our state but in the entire country. This is because the successive governments at the Centre are coming out with new policies and reversing the decisions of earlier governments. The previous UPA government has enacted RTE Act in haste. This Act says that 25 per cent of secondary school students should be transferred to private schools. We have about three lakh employees, of which 1.40 lakh are teachers alone. If RTE is implemented, nearly 40,000 teachers would be left with no work to do,” Mr Chandrasekhar Rao said.

The Chief Minister also took a dig at the model schools launched by UPA government. “They have set up several model schools in our state and recruited around 3,000 teachers. But after NDA government came to power, it stopped funding to these schools. With this, the entire burden is being borne by the state government now,” he said.

Referring to RTE Act, he said, “I met Chief Justice of High Court and personally informed him about the follies in this Act. I told him that about 70 per cent of the total states in the country have been opposing RTE and the Centre has assured to look into this issue. I urged him to give some time for state government to take a call on implementation of RTE quota,” Mr Rao said.

“We have decided to set up 70 residential English medium schools for minorities this year. This will be part of our KG-to-PG scheme. If we open these schools now and the Centre insists on RTE Act later, we don't know what would be the implications,” he said.

“Unrecognised schools are a problem. But we can't close them just like that because students will suffer. We need to discuss on what to do,” the CM said.

Admitting that private schools have been imposing heavy fee burden on parents, the CM said the government was in the process to bring fee regulation authority to control fees.