TALK BY ASHOK AGARWAL – Role of Lawyers in Education

ABSTRACT

Until not so long ago, lawyers has little or no role in school education, except perhaps in relation to cases regarding service matters of teachers and of cases of school managements against teachers etc. The phenomenon of voluntary action by lawyers is a fairly recent trend, perhaps not more than 10 to 15 years old. However, as soon as education comes to be defined as a right of the child, the importance of lawyers in completing the circuit that which will ensure the right to education becomes inevitable.

This lecture will trace the movement for defending the right to education from the advent of PILs to the present, before discussing some issues that can and have emerged in the context of right to education in schools. Some of these relate to – denial of admission in government schools; against child cruelty in the name of private school admissions; lack of basic provisions in schools – water, electricity, tin roofs and tents: protection from the weather; corporal punishment and other forms of humiliation; lack of connection from primary to upper primary education; the dissociation between the aims of education vs the goals of schools; the issue of unjustified Fee hike in private schools and of the issue of free land to schools and deprivation of educational rights of poor children.

This lecture will then discuss how in taking action on behalf of educational rights of poor children, one comes to awareness that simply finding a case and fighting it is not enough. Unless public opinion and public anger is also built up against such denials, these wrongs will continue. I will then discuss how I learnt to enlist the support of the media in creating awareness and opinion.

At the same time, however, I realized that going to the courts alone cannot and should not be an answer to all ills in education. Mobilising public outcry is also important. Sometimes, when people come together to demand action, matters can be rectified without going to a court. I will discuss in my lecture how at this point, I learnt to strategise, when to use what strategy to achieve justice for children’s right to education.

However, there is a limit to what one lawyer can do. There are many problems for one lawyer to cope with. Through my work so far I have merely demonstrated what lawyers can do and how to do it. But it cannot be denied that there needs to be an escalation of lawyer intervention on behalf of the child. Perhaps time has come to move from individual initiative to networked legal aid; to development of systems of case support to lawyers; to evolution of government schemes of lawyer involvement; for informational systems to be developed for orientation and briefing of lawyers and judges in right to education.

May be it is also time for including Right to Education (RTE) in the formal and informal curriculum of legal education. Students in law colleges should learn about child rights and their defence in the curriculum, just as they learn about contracts and criminal law. Universities should actively think about separate optional papers, diploma and certificate courses in RTE. Similarly, there could be research on PILs in education.

In closing, I would like to argue that legal intervention acts as a trigger to reform in education. Not only does it serve to highlight wrongs and rectify them, but ultimately, it will also build communities in schools who know their rights and duties and there are fewer predispositions towards misbehaviour. Already, the parents in private schools are no longer as timid as they once were, and already government officers are becoming alert to ensuring transparency and justice. Through the intervention of lawyers, I see a vision of future with mutual respect and improved provisioning of education from a rights-based perspective.


NCERT Memorial Lecture Series 2010-11
On 5th October 2010 At 2:30 p.m.
At The Regional Institute of Education, Bhopal