Sandeep Banerjee is the Delhi-based managing director and CEO of Edenred India

After decades of neglect of a directive principle (erstwhile Article 45) of the Constitution of India to provide free and compulsory education to all children until the age of 14 years “within ten years of the commencement of this Constitution”, Parliament passed the Right to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. However, the Act limits the obligation of the State (Central and state governments) to children aged six-14 years. Moreover, it imposes an obligation upon all private — including unaided — schools to reserve 25 percent capacity in elementary school (classes I-VIII) for poor children in their neighbourhood. The RTE Act and its constitutional validity was upheld by the Supreme Court in its majority judgement in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (2010), delivered on April 12 this year.

However, even two years after the RTE Act became law, there is no clear process to implement the 25 percent reservation mandated by s. 12(1)(c) of the RTE Act for economically weaker sections in private unaided schools, barring the state of Gujarat which has framed comprehensive rules.

The conundrum is whether to fund students or schools. If schools are funded, the basis and proof of admission of poor neighbourhood children will remain a challenge. On the other hand, if students are funded, establishing whether the funds will be used for education by the child or her parents poses other challenges. Moreover, there are numerous delivery mechanisms for the transfer of funds — cheques, bank drafts, direct transfers or cash as not all beneficiaries will have bank accounts. In turn, writing cheques/drafts create administrative and logistics problems while cash transfers can be misused.

Against this backdrop, the education/school voucher system is arguably the best solution for implementing the provisions of s.12(1)(c). School vouchers enable parents/students to use them as a financial instrument to easily access quality private education. Conceptually, a school voucher is a non-transferable, secure instrument that allows beneficiaries to pay tuition fees at a neighbourhood primary school in lieu of money.

An increasingly popular methodology being adopted by governments worldwide to close the quality gap between private and government schools is through the issuance of school vouchers directly to socio-economically deprived children. The voucher submitted by a student to the school of her choice covers the full or partial cost of education at the school. Schools collect vouchers from students send them to a third-party service provider who credits the school’s bank account with the face value amount of the voucher with the bank debiting the account of the government. Under this scheme, leakages are controlled as transparency is maintained throughout the voucher ecosystem. The flow is managed by the third-party service provider as the voucher moves from the student to school, and back to the government.

Under the current system, most state schools are accountable to the government. Adoption of the voucher system will make school managements directly accountable to students since they pay for their education through vouchers. If a student does not find her school satisfactory, she can take the voucher to another school. As a result of conferring the freedom of choice upon students, school managements will rush to provide access, improve quality and infrastructure to attract students.

The success of pilot voucher programmes as evidenced by widespread acceptance and appreciation from all stakeholders could form the basis for rolling out the voucher model nationally. For example, the School Choice Vouchers programme for girls, implemented by the Centre for Civil Society in partnership with Edenred (a third party services provider) in seven wards of north-east Delhi, has proved successful. This pilot programme has positively impacted parents and students of 400 girl children from poor households in Delhi. Another example is the ENABLE voucher programme managed by UK-based NGO ARK and Edenred. Active since 2010, the programme has allowed 850 children from poorer sections of society to access low-cost private schools in the national capital.

The school vouchers model to distribute social benefits in education has shown encouraging results globally. Ticket Junaeb in Chile and Dote Scuola in Italy supports over 200,000 and 220,000 socio-economically disadvantaged children respectively, who are enrolled in schools of their choice.

Although India’s 80,000 private schools which provide vastly superior primary-secondary education can’t make good the learning outcomes deficiencies of 1.30 million government schools, the official adoption of the vouchers system offers a substantial number of underprivileged children a valuable opportunity to avail quality school education. Private schools too will derive the benefit of classroom diversity which will prepare their increasingly elite and alienated students for college and university and workplaces which are highly diversified.

In short, the advantages of the education vouchers system which funds students and not schools, heavily outweigh its disadvantages. It needs the serious consideration of the Union and state governments countrywide.

Also read: RTE Act lunacies and lacunae