Towards a Capability-Based Constitutional Right to Education in India: Evaluating Existing Legal Framework Through the Lens of Eight Minimum Educational Capability Guarantees

Abstract

Nearly two decades after the constitutionalisation of the right to education under Article 21-A and more than a decade after the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, India's education system delivers schools to children without delivering education to them. This paper argues that the failure is not primarily one of implementation but of conception: the existing framework reduces a transformative constitutional guarantee to a bureaucratic exercise in infrastructure compliance, equating enrolment with empowerment and schooling with education. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capability approach, Martha Nussbaum's ten central capabilities and the 4-A framework of General Comment 13 on Article 13 of the ICESCR, the paper proposes eight Minimum Educational  Capability Guarantees as the constitutionally adequate content of Article 21-A. It then subjects the RTE Act to a capability audit and to proportionality review under Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), demonstrating that the Act is formally constitutional but substantively deficient. The paper concludes with a structured two-step judicial test for Article 21-A adjudication and argues for the progressive extension of the right to education to the age of 18.