The Madras High Court has directed the School Education department to initiate immediate and appropriate action against private schools which fail to allocate and fill up free seats for economically poor children in the neighbourhood under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act of 2009.
Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and R. Hemalatha issued the direction on a public interest litigation petition filed by Mohamed Ghouse who claimed to be State secretary of Welfare Party. The plea of the petitioner was to order simplification of procedures involved in submitting applications online for RTE admissions.
Pointing out that the State government had created an exclusive web portal for submission of RTE applications, the petitioner alleged that many parents could not submit applications for the academic sessions 2019-20 due to some technical glitches in the fourth stage of the application submission process.
Refuting the allegation, Special Government Pleader (Education) C. Munusamy told the court that a well defined mechanism had been put in place to admit students under RTE Act. He said, the RTE intake capacity in the State was 1,24,859 seats and that 74,667 students were admitted in the entry category of LKG and 2,260 candidates in Class I during the current academic year.
Without doing any due diligence and collecting sufficient particulars, the petitioner had approached the court just for publicity, he alleged. The SGP also stated that parents could submit the online applications for RTE seats through more than 10,000 e-seva centres established across the State.
