The Social Contract and India’s Right to Education

India’s 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Actpresents an idealized social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors touphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children’s accessto a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract as-sumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutualresponsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data fromBihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups andteachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminatesthe unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relationsin education. It problematizes the idealization of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognize and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway toward addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education