Meeting with DCPCR

Participants: Jan S Rao, Shekhar

Date: 22 July 2010

We went to the DCPCR office today to meet the Chairman Mr Amod Kanth and RTE-Consultant Mr B.C Narula. It was a good meeting with a lot of insights for us.

Having Jan around is such a blessing! His foreign origin, white hair and funny hindi accent  puts everyone at ease.

Mr Narula was also quite impressed with the resource base we had built up on this portal. Pretty soon DCPCR website should be up and running and they agreed to link righttoeducation.in to their portal. Yay!

Since RTE Act was passed DCPCR has received over 7100 complaints and has already resolved over 1000 of them. Most of them are related to admissions.

It was interesting to listen to stories of the way these folks are making use of the RTE Act.

One interesting case which Mr Narula narrated was the use of Section 12 which mandates 25% reservation in Private schools for economically weaker sections. A kid in a particular private school was dismissed because his parents had not paid the fees for last 6 months or so. Turns out that both parents are in jail. Mr Narula asked the school to show him the records of the students who fall under EWS section. School immediately agreed to take the kid back :)

Other types of complaints where DCPCR had used RTE were related to Capitation fees, corporal punishment etc. 

He also mentioned that one of the major reasons for MCD schools to refuse admissions was the shortage of teachers and MCD just opened around 5000 vacancies for teachers on contract basis.

All in all a very informative meeting.

-Shekhar