Admissions under RTE Act to begin tomorrow

Mumbai: The admission process under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, is all set to begin from Thursday. For the coming academic year 2018-19, the Brihanmum-bai Municipal Corporation (BMC) education department has introduced several provisions to make the online process easy. These include a mobile application and an online grievance cell for parents to understand the step-by-step process of the RTE admission.

Also, this year, the RTE portal will be connected to the “mahaonline” portal through which income certificates submitted by students will be scanned and verified.

Mahesh Palkar, BMC education officer, told The Asian Age, “Parents tend to either submit fake income certificates or back off from the admission process. Such incidents were reported last year. Hence, to prevent cancellation of admission owing to incomplete documentation, the linkage to mahaonline will help smoothen the admission process.”

Students of families with an annual income of less than Rs 1 lakh are allowed to enroll for admissions. Till last year, only students’ fathers’ income certificates were allowed during enrolment. This year however, the department will accept the income certificate from the guardian or anyone taking care of the child. Moreover, this year, parents will be allowed to choose 10 schools during filing forms for RTE

admissions unlike last year, when they were allowed to choose only five schools.

For this academic year, there are 7,449 seats at 334 private unaided schools in the Mumbai region. While the process of RTE admissions usually starts by February 1 every year, this year, due to linkage to mahaonline, there was a delay of seven days.

Through RTE admissions, students coming from financially weaker sections will still be able to enroll in private unaided schools, for which it is mandatory to reserve 25 per cent of their seats. Through RTE, elementary education (from class 1 to 8) is entirely funded by the Maharashtra government.