Centre likely to introduce Right to Education Bill next week

NEW DELHI: The Centre is planning to introduce the landmark Right to Education Bill in the parliament next week, a senior official of HRD Ministry has said.

"In India, education is free but not compulsory. The government's plan is to make it necessary for all children. We will introduce a bill in this regard in the ongoing session of parliament," said Arun Kumar Rath, Secretary, Elementary Education, HRD Ministry, at a function here.

He said the government was planning to double the expenditure on education in order to provide education and better facilities to all.

"We are going to enter the school education sector in a big way. This sector was ignored as a state subject. With government planning to increase expenditure on school, the standard of education would certainly go up," Rath said.

Speaking at the inaugural function of the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technologies organised by the KIIT University yesterday, he said the Education Bill would ensure every child could get an access to education.

The GoM, entrusted with the task of scrutinising the contentious Bill, had cleared the draft legislation earlier without diluting the content including some of the contentious provisions, like 25 per cent reservation in private schools for disadvantaged children from the neighbourhood at the entry level.