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Lok Sabha passes Bill to do away with no-detention policy

If the Rajya Sabha passes it, students who fail a regular examination and a retest in Classes 5 and 8 can be detained till they complete elementary education.

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HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar speaks in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday
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The Lok Sabha on Monday passed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Second Amendment) Bill, 2017, allowing for the detention of children below the eighth standard who fail in their examinations.

As per the amendment, any child below the eighth standard will have to sit for exams in the fifth and eighth standards, and in case they fail, will have to sit for another exam within two months. If the child fails for the second time, then the state government will decide if the child will be detained or not. The Bill, however, mandates that no child will be expelled for not passing examinations.

The RTE Act, when it was passed in 2009, brought in a no detention policy. Introducing the amendment in the house, Human Resources Development minister Prakash Javadekar said the demands for the repeal of the no detention policy was made by many states and Union Territories in recent years following poor marks by students. He said the Bill was necessitated by the lowering of learning outcomes.

During the discussions on the Bill, Congress MP KC Venugopal said the government should clarify details of Centre-state share on funding on education. He said in his own parliamentary constituency, Alappuzha ,the Centre's grant under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan fell from Rs 125 crore to a mere Rs 25 crore. "In the district, only 18 schools have been selected for grants from among 1,000 schools and officials say that it's on a first-come, first-serve basis," he said.

BJP MP from Sikar Sumedhanand Saraswati, supporting the Bill, said education should be made a state subject and that different states should have different syllabi keeping in mind their own cultural systems.

BJD MP Bhartruhari Mahtab said different states had divergent views on the no detention policy, and while his home state Odisha wanted it revisited, six states — Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Goa, Maharashtra and Telangana — wanted it to remain. Stating that a balance needs to be made, he said, "The Geeta Bhukkal Committee Report, which forms the basis of the present Amendment, actually did not find any evidence of improvement of learning after detention. If you put the child in the school for one year, six months, two months, it also needs to be qualified/checked whether that child has improved."

TDP MP Jithender Reddy was one of the few MPs who did not support the amendment. "Poor learning outcomes due to school related factors like lack of professionally qualified teachers, absenteeism of teachers and limited infrastructure," he said.

What It Means

If the Rajya Sabha too passes the amendment, students who fail a regular examination and a retest in Classes 5 and 8 can be detained till they complete elementary education.

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