Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has set aside a state order denying a six-year-old underprivileged child admission to a private school under the Right to Education (RTE) Act quota on account of breaching the eligibility rules regarding the distance between home and school.
The DDE agreed with the school’s decision, prompting Kamble to approach the high court for relief. She also submitted that the cancelled admission would mean her daughter would lose an academic year. The state argued that its decision was in line with the rules under the RTE Act. It also alleged that Kamble had misrepresented the distance between her home and the school and misled the authorities, and had deliberately chosen schools far from her home.
The court was hearing a petition filed by Karuna Kamble, a 38-year-old resident of the BDD Chawl in Worli. When the matter was escalated to the DDE, the school claimed that Kamble’s home was beyond 1 km from the school, thereby breaching the distance rule under the RTE quota. In her petition, Kamble said that while two other children whose homes were between 1 km and 3 km from the school were admitted by Balmohan Vidyamandir, the DDE cancelled her daughter’s admission on the basis of an education inspector’s report stating that her home was 4 km from the school.
Because their home address was beyond the prescribed distance from the school, kamble had challenged a decision by the Deputy Director of Education (DDE), Mumbai Region, in August to cancel the admission granted to her six-year-old daughter at Balmohan Vidyamandir under the 25% RTE quota for children from economically weaker sections (EWS).
In a metropolis like Mumbai, the court said, the state “could not have applied the barometer of distance…with exactitude,” especially when the chances of the child securing admission in any other private unaided school had diminished. The distance criterion stipulated in the RTE rules needs to be applied with “requisite flexibility” depending on the area’s geographical realities, it added. Kamble said that her daughter had secured admission in Balmohan Vidyamandir through the RTE quota in April after submitting all the necessary documents. However, the school later “blatantly and brazenly” refused to admit her daughter without a reason, she claimed, adding that other EWS children, too, had been denied admission similarly. Balmohan Vidyamandir’s counsel said that the high court had previously, in a series of decisions, upheld the area restriction for admission under the RTE.
In a ruling expected to have a bearing on school admissions under the RTE, a single-judge bench of justice N J Jamadar observed that a “neighbourhood school” described under the Act cannot be construed in a “rigid and pedantic manner”.
