Universal Primary Education Case Study

Introduction:
When the United Nations met in the year 2000 (one of the largest gatherings of representatives in the world) they signed an agreement to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015. India was one of the countries that agreed to work on these goals. As we saw India attempting to achieve the goals we saw a myriad of development plans and projects being undertaken by the government. Take the case of the goal of Universal Primary Education (UPE). With such a goal and such a short time frame of 15 years the government decided that the best way to assure that they could be achieved was to create a rights based legislation that ensures that primary education was a justiciable right. Hence the creation of the Right of Children
Hence to a certain degree the goal of UPE should have been achieved, yet the same population has immense trouble with regards to basic numeracy and literacy. Can this be considered UPE, is the next question that now surrounds us. The goal regarding UPE states that by 2015 boys and girls will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. In the current law it states that the government cannot detain a child in the same class and that he must pass every year irrespective of his ability to grasp the course. The students shall essentially have completed the course without learning the basic skills to be applied in daily life. With just the entry of children in schools enough for the state to wipe their hands of the responsibility of educating them? Therefore with regards to the goals should they focus on the outcomes of learning rather than attending school and going through the curriculum in their
The nature of democracy is to ensure a constant change based on the velocity of change in society. The faster a nation changes its mind, the faster the view on policies, laws and reforms are changed. Therefore when India signed the agreement we had a BJP heading NDA government at the center, while the years following till 2014 we had a Congress heading UPA. The manner in which these governments took to achieving these goals were very different. During Vajpayee’s period as Prime Minister of India he did create the Direct Primary Education Programme (DPEP) it wasn’t a justifiable right, yet the basic structure was comparable to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) created by the UPA for the working of the RTE. By changing the demand for the achievement of the goals certain aspects in terms of feasibility were forsaken. This can heavily be observed regarding debates for the Right to Food Security Act (RTF) where the opposition heavily criticized the spending for the provision of food security to all. This was not essentially true as we can see in the law that it mainly combines already existing provisions created by other governments. This led to a lot of ill will from the general public that was affected by the recession at the time. On the other hand because the UPA government were so