Right to Education Act - Schools closed

India's Right To Education Act recently came into being and is starting to be implemented by the authorities in each state.  As with most top down regulations, the law of unintended consequences comes into play.  With this Act, the most immediate impact, is that thousands of schools across the country are set to be closed down.  The reason being that these local schools don't comply with the inevitable top down regulations that came with the Act.

The first states to implement this are Punjab and Haryana - 1900 schools are being closed in just these 2 states.  A Right To Education Act sounds like a great idea - who could be against it.  The problem is you can't just legislate and make people richer or better educated.  Central planning doesn't work.  In fact, it often has the opposite consequence.

Some people may say that its right to set minimum standards for education and schools that don't comply should be closed.  The political reality is that it only applies to private schools.  There are no state schools due to close - only private ones.  This is not because the standards of government schools are better than private ones - government schools much worse than private ones - if they weren't, no one would pay extra for private schooling.

So the immediate impact of the Right To Education Act is that hundreds of thousands of children in India, who were going to school, will now no longer have a school to go to.  I couldn't think of a more terrible example of the law of unintended consequence.