Education now a right in India

Indian has approved a landmark education bill which guarantees children aged between six and 14 compulsory free education. The bill, which also covers children with disabilities, will build and set up new state-run local schools over the next three years. Private schools will be made to reserve at least a quarter of their places for poor children. The scheme, will need to be formalised, comes exactly 14 years after the world’s second most populated country first proposed such rights for its children.

India's Minister for Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal said it marked the coming of a new era. "We as a nation cannot afford our children not going to schools," he said. "This bill provides for the inclusion of children who are disadvantaged because of disability. The government is not only setting up special schools for them but doing all it can to provide education to them in all types of schools," Mr Sibal said.

About 70 million children in India have no schooling, and more than a third of the population can’t read or write. The achievement has been dubbed a "landmark" with politicians cutting across party lines to vote for the "The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill" yesterday in the lower house of Parliament without any protest. It is considered one of the most important legislations in the last 62 years since Independence. “Probably, this was one of the rare occasions when politicians from ruling United Progressie Alliance as well as from opposition parties agreed unanimously to approve the historic bill, " political scientist Professor Ajay Singh, told reporters. "Now, for a country like India which is forging ahead in the global arena, the importance of education has been felt 14 years back. But, this is democracy, that is why it took a long time to finally pass the bill – a cherished dream which finally came true despite rough weather in the last decade," he added. The bill will also end the widespread practices of schools imposing admission fees on parents to guarantee their children a.

Universal education is one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals to be met by the year 2015. But critics say it is not clear how the government plans to pay for this. Also, they say it does not cover children below the age of six and therefore fails to recognise the importance of the early years of a child's development.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children