In August 2005, a bill was drafted with a sense of hope. This was the bill that would change the face of education in India. The draft brimmed with new ideas, the most radical being a clause that made it compulsory for private schools to have reservations so that rich and poor rubbed shoulders in the schoolroom and learnt about the way the other India lived.

The ministers and bureaucrats were unimpressed by this Gandhian vision, authored by the Government of India's Central Advisory Board for Education. More than unimpressed, they were unwilling. Reservations is a prickly political chestnut at the best of times and this ambitious clause was something they certainly did not want on their heads.

Three years have passed. The bill has been bounced around like an unwanted ball from department to department, it has been buried and resurrected and sent to limbo land. The cabinet has not bother- ed to read or discuss it. It was not introduced in the budget session. Right now, it is stuck somewhere in the bewildering maze that is the bureaucracy.

After the 2002 86th constitutional amendment made education a fundamental right for children under fourteen, the NDA government drafted a bill on the right to education. The bill never reached parliament. When the UPA government was elected, the issue was brought up again and a new bill was drafted in 2005. While the NDA bill had been drafted by government officers alone, the UPA bill involved a much wider range of professionals including university teachers, NGOs and government servants. The signs were good but educationists have long learnt not to always trust the signs.

So what is the Right to Education bill all about? Broadly speaking, it aims at setting minimum standards for both public and private schools so that the quality of education improves throughout the country and current inequities are levelled. While most will have no quarrel with this aim, many may have serious reservations about the method. A controversial clause makes it compulsory for all private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for poor children from the neighbourhood. This includes elite ICSE and IB schools, too. So even a school like a DPS in Delhi would be subject to this clause as would a Cathedral or a Dhirubhai Ambani in Mumbai and a St Xavier's and a La Martiniere in Kolkata. The bill has been fiercely opposed by the private school lobby which feels that opening its doors to the dhobi's son and the driver's daughter will dilute its brand value and lower standards. There is also the problematic issues of the high fees that some schools charge and the culture of elitism they espouse.

On another front, the bill aims at plugging some of the loopholes in the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. For instance, it wants to outlaw non-formal education and do away with the contract system of recruiting teachers which has proved disastrous.

"All non-formal schools across the country will as per the bill have three years to upgrade themselves to formal schools, which provide the minimum standards prescribed by the bill," says Vinod Raina, one of the architects of the bill. A physics teacher at Delhi University, Raina was one of the founders of the Eklavya Program, set up in Madhya Pradesh in 1972 to bring quality education to disadvantaged children.

As for the contract system, the government currently allows schools to appoint teachers on a contract basis and pay them a paltry sum of Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 a month. Very often these teachers are simply not qualified to teach. The bill wants that this be abolished and that all teachers, both in private and government schools, be appointed on a permanent basis and given a full salary as long as they are qualified. Recognising the fact that there is a huge shortage of trained teachers across the country, the bill provides for a five-year period for the government to create a talent pool by launching wide-scale teacher-training programs.

One of the reasons given for the delay is that the costs to implement this bill will be staggering. The current estimates stand at Rs 1,51,000 crore. "It's sad that we do not believe that the right to education is as important as the right to life," says Nilesh Nimkar, Unicef advisor in Maharashtra and director of Quest, an organisation that works for the education of adivasi children. "Without education it's virtually impossible to lead a life of dignity. It's important for the government, within reasonable limits, to spend on education." India spends around 3.7% (under 4%) of its GDP on education. This is meagre given that most countries that put a premium on education spend at least 6% of the GDP, if not more, on education.

After the bill was drafted in August 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sent it to a High Level Group (HLG) which included the finance minister and the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. The HLG decided there was no need to pass any central legislation on education. So the bill was converted into a model bill and sent to all the states.

State governments were told to pass their own legislation, with a note from the central government asking them to put education on top of their list of priorities, second only to law and order. The states promptly sent the model bill back and asked the Centre to heed its own advice.

The bill was virtually buried for two years. In between, a mid-census correction reduced the child population by six million so budgets were halved from Rs 3,21,000 crore to Rs 1,51,000 crore. Finally, a team of educationists, two of whom were involved in the drafting of the bill, wrote a letter to the prime minister raising the issue of central legislation on education.

The PM met them in August 2007. Subsequently, the PM chaired a meeting of the HLG in February 2008 and directed that central legislation be introduced in the budget session. A new draft of the bill was created by the end of February 2008. However, there are still many hurdles. The bill required the approval of the Planning Commission as well as several ministries such as the ministries for woman and child development, finance and law.

Not surprisingly, the budget session came and went with the bill still bouncing between departments. The good news is that it has been cleared by the finance ministry and the Planning Commission. Right now it is with the law ministry. The monsoon session is upon us. Will the UPA government deliver on its promise and pass a landmark bill or will it be banished to a dark corner of the deep freeze?