NEW DELHI: Only eight per cent of schools across the country comply with the provision of Right To Education (RTE) Act, the RTE Forum said on Tuesday.
The civil society organisation said that the number of RTE -complying schools has declined over the years and that vacancies in teachers posts continue with around 13 lakh posts to be filled.
"India's spending on education is less than three per cent of GDP, compared to its obligation of spending six per cent; India's per capita spending on education is approximately four times less than the spending incurred by middle-income countries," the consortium of civil societies working on RTE said in a statement, issued on the day it held its national stocktaking convention here.
"Only eight per cent schools across the country comply with the provisions of the RTE Act; the share of compliant schools has indeed declined over the years... Teacher vacancies continue; almost 20 per cent of teachers in India are untrained," it said.
Forum convener Ambarish Rai told IANS this is the result of underfunded education and lack of seriousness on the part of the government.
"Out of 15 lakh schools (government and government-aided), only eight per cent schools can said to be complying with the RTE provisions. The government had set the deadline of 2013 to make all schools RTE complaint, but they are far from hitting the target even after five years of that," he said.
The 92 per cent schools which fell short of the RTE Act, were also found lacking on several measures as separate toilets for boys and girls, availability of drinking water, student-teacher ratio, etc.
The failure of government in training the teachers was one of the principal reason for poor quality of schooling, Rai said.
"The teachers were supposed to be trained by 2015, a deadline they missed. Now, they are training them through mobile, through TV because the training institutes they had opened are paralysed due to lack of funds. How do you expect to improve the education quality like this?" he said.