[mpisgmedia] CABE / sub-judice common-school-system issues

> in continuation of
http://mail.architexturez.net/pipermail/mpisgmedia/2005-July/000411.html


Reduction of common-school-system to hollow slogan was
confirmed by news reports of CABE meeting of
14-15/07/05, a week after end of Public Notice period
for DMP2021 that proposes to abandon perhaps the only
statutory CSS scheme that Free & Compulsory Education
Bill could have extrapolated but has not.

We must all share the blame for failing to ensure CSS
(equal access neighbourhood schooling for all
children) and imminent legislating of duality in
education that we are all party to promoting. Duality
thrives, on one hand, on commercialisation (founded on
illegal diversion of space meant and needed for CSS,
as demonstrated in MPISG PIL that led to order of
27/10/04 for time-bound action against violations)
and, equally, on beggarly alternatives for the poor
(illegal free-seats-for-BPL, illegal separate-shift
schools, so-called learning centres that have
outstripped schools as per GNCTD budget speech
reference to 202 NGOs running nearly 3500 of them as
compared to about 2500 primary schools) and
special-children preoccupations (a contradiction
marking no less than CABE committee nomenclature, viz,
Girls Education and Common School System). With NGO
funding freely flowing, activism serving
self-aggrandisement rather than education goals and
network of learning-centres suited less to education
than to retailing the merchandise of mid-day-meal and
uniform-and-bag businesses, the alternatives are no
less commercial than what is commonly called
commercialisation of education.

It cannot be that all or most are knowingly part of
it, but the symbiosis between commercial interests at
both ends of this duality is undoubtedly driving the
discourse on education, eg, GNCTD is furiously
promoting illegal options and MPISG PIL has clearly
revealed that violations impeding CSS are mostly on
account of GNCTD illegal essentiality-certificates and
upgradation-permissions (that add up to compromising
local-enrolment and hence the basis of neighbourhood
schooling, with the poor worst affected by the
resultant exclusion and most problems in government
schools, and justification of alternatives, traceable
to consequent overcrowding, etc). In this situation
simply forcing free-seats conditions on private
schools is hardly viable or legally tenable and the
haloes of learning-centre-walas clamouring for this
look as ludicrous as those of schools deviously or
defensively claiming their wilful charity is better,
most of all in court, with hordes of men and women in
black keenly arguing -- in name of teaching the poor,
while CSS law in the capital is poised to be abandoned
and new law is poised to make the abandoning
nation-wide -- well, nothing (since the free-seats
starting point has no basis in either education law on
which the matters challenging the GNCTD free-seats
directive rely or development law from which the
free-seats condition flows).

On 15/07/05 the bunch of schools matters being heard
in Delhi High Court (in which MPISG has filed an
intervention to protect its PIL Order of 27/10/04)
were listed before HMJ Vikramjit Sen. Counsel for
(some of) the petitioners and DDA had submitted that
the matters were part-heard by HMJ Gita Mittal and an
order was passed for transferring them back. The list
for 22/07/05, however, had them at items 26-31 before
HMJ Vikramjit Sen and I landed up in his court. As
item 9 reached just before lunch I came out to look
for counsel in the matters to ask if MoHRD had filed
an affidavit. I found one and was told the matters had
already been called by HMJ Gita Mittal and adjourned
to 18/08/05 (which tides over even late-admissions
period this year). I went back to Court 10 and learned
from court master that indeed items 26-31 had been
deleted. I went to Court 12 and learned from court
master that indeed the matters had been called and
adjourned and HMJ Gita Mittal would be in a DB in the
afternoon. I found the chamber of GNCTD counsel where
I learned from associates that the matters had been
adjourned after counsel for (some of) the petitioners
had asked for them to be released from part-heard
category. That sounds like what they call court-craft!

I had gone today hoping to request copies of pleadings
and consideration of our view also by UoI-MoHRD with
reference to affairs of CABE. No one I met could tell
me if UoI-MoHRD or DDA have filed affidavits. We have
not heard from MoHRD or NCERT or NIEPA in response to
request for CABE committee material, or from MoHRD in
response to prior request for its view before end of
DMP2021 Public Notice period. MPISG has, of course
filed detailed response on DMP2021 proposals for
schools. And we have enough to keep moving courts for
as long as we wish. But the children who started the
MPISG efforts in 2000 are done with primary school,
and questions of justice can no longer be answered by
the questions of law that we have successfully raised
and the discourse has successfully ignored.

22/07/05




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