ABSTRACT
India's 2009 Right of Children to a Free and Compulsory Education (RtE) Act makes education a fundamental right of children aged six to fourteen, with consideration underway to expand inclusion to ages four to sixteen. This chapter provides the RtE Act in the context of human rights law, the history of education in India, and globalized trends in neoliberal educational restructuring. It explores socially grounded perspectives on and experiences with the implementation of the RtE Act across elite private, government, nongovernment, and low-fee private educational sectors. The chapter describes equal access mechanisms embedded in the RtE Act in order to analyze the flexible, often fraught relationship between the legal and political processes of formalizing a human right, and the everyday sociocultural processes of articulating and achieving justice via democratizing education. The right to education receives detailed treatment in Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
