Over 90 per cent of schools in Bangalore are not responding immediately to queries from parents seeking admissions through the RTE quota and most of them get turned away. We have been only 10 per cent successful in implementing RTE in Karnataka, said Umesh Aradhya, chairperson of the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (KSCPCR).
He was speaking at the launch of ‘Shikshana Makkala Hakku’, a book on the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act-2009 written by Gangadhar Reddy N, convenor of the RTE Task Force, at the South India Cell for Human Rights Education and Monitoring (SICHREM).
“Many schools are refusing to be questioned by authorities regarding aberrations in RTE admissions. It is not working out very well and children are suffering because of that,” Aradhya said.
Many parents and social workers who struggled to obtain admissions in schools through the RTE quota shared their experiences at the RTE Task Force meeting.
Ningegowda, a parent, said that when applications were submitted to the Block Education Officer (BEO) of his area and admissions were obtained, schools did not bother to inform parents that their children had procured admission. “My daughter’s name was on the list but the school authorities did not inform us. When we went back to the school to equestion them about why we weren’t told earlier, they said they had more important things to do,” he said.