Rights are on the agenda in Indian politics today. Every child in India between the ages of six and fourteen now has the legally enforceable right to a free education (RTE) and indications are that this may be followed by the introduction of a right to food.Critics of RTE rightly point out how difficult it will be to implement the new law. The country lacks enough trained teachers to cope with the estimated 8 million school-age children who are not in schools right now. More seriously, many government schools lack even basic facilities for their current intake. Even in a prosperous state like Punjab, nearly two-thirds of the schools do not have tables and desks, and nearly 60% of teachers have patchy attendance records. Cynics may be right to say that on its own the Bill does little more than give poor and rural children the ?right to a bad education?.

But the status quo is unacceptable, and what India does to give its children access to universal education will be the single greatest predictor of whether it becomes a great power in the 21st century. Double-digit growth rates, market capitalisations of companies and rising numbers of billionaires make good headlines?all these positive economic indicators pale in comparison to the massive waste of human capital and potential that characterises much of India?s state education sector. If the country does not act to stem this catastrophic loss now, it will throw away the demographic dividend that its increasingly young population will give it over the next four decades, along with throwing away its greatest opportunity for economic growth. RTE is about more than just economics, or even the life chances of the young. It?s also about what the

Indian state becomes in the 21st century and whether it changes its relationship to its citizens in the most beneficial way.

The past century has seen a series of transitions in the nature of the state in the West. At the beginning of the century, the security state underpinned society?s commercial prosperity with military power. Internal social pressures and the rise of communism compelled the security state to transform itself into a welfare state charged with protecting the individual from poverty and other social ills from cradle to grave. In the last quarter of the century, the market state sought to reposition itself as the provider of quantifiable services to the citizen as consumer. This transactional view of the relationship between citizen and state is now slowly being superseded by a risk-sharing relationship, in which the citizen trades part of his rights for a defined level of protection and security from the state, which openly enumerates the risks that it cannot hedge against without further concessions by citizens. These stages have not always been mutually exclusive even in the West, but we can nonetheless trace an overall shift in the individual?s position vis-?-vis the state over the past hundred years?wherein the individual has evolved from subject and entitlement-holder to consumer and partner.

India?s postcolonial history and the demands of the Cold War and economic liberalisation have meant that the Indian state has evolved along a slightly different path than most Western states. Post-1947, India began its life as a mirror image of the colonial security state, which sought to protect domestic order through a certain administrative distance from the bulk of its subjects. In more recent years, the state has in many ways begun to transform into a market state by privatising or unbundling state enterprises and infrastructure, and more such changes are no doubt on the way. The public reaction to the Mumbai attacks has shown that the Indian public has no appetite for a state that shares risk with its citizens in exchange for bargains on rights. But much of the current government?s programme promises to make a radical change in the state?s relationship to its citizens, who will be able to demand that the state fulfil its obligations to them.

In the simplest sense, this change is a logical payoff to the citizen in exchange for transformations that will bind him more closely to the state than before: the new identity ?smartcard? and universal forms of taxation such as VAT. For those who have been on the margins of the state?untaxed, unprovided for and often unnoticed?the kind of changes that rights like RTE imply could turn them into citizens in the full sense of the word, for the first time. They will probably come to make an equally big difference in areas like the Northeast and the districts threatened by Naxals, where the security state will eventually be replaced by the one compelled by law to provide for its citizens. A state driven by this imperative would be more likely to win the war for hearts and minds than any insurgents could ever hope to.

Over the short term, the big question will, of course, be whether or not RTE leads to a better state education system. If both state and civil society are complacent, many children new to education will be greeted by decrepit school buildings, nonexistent desks, missing books and absent teachers. But a vigilant civil society could, for example, choose to use the increasingly activist court system to leverage market-based education systems in the interests of the poor. It is not impossible that a PIL in favour of deprived children could result in the government having either to pay for places in fee-paid schools in the short term or hire teaching staff from the private sector to run state schools. The cost of this would soon become unbearable, and this would trigger a choice: continue to pay over the odds for market-based solutions, or try to solve basic problems like teacher absenteeism and poor training through public-sector innovation.

RTE doesn?t have to be an invitation for more of the same government bureaucracy, or even for more of the poor education that stymies many of India?s young. There is plenty of room for new approaches to teacher-training and education for the poor, and Indian educators have a growing track record in solving specific problems: just look at the successes of Old Delhi?s Rabea Girls Public school for poor Muslim girls and Bihar?s Super-30 initiative.

The right mix of public-sector compulsion and educational innovation could turn RTE into the beginning of a major change, not just for education but also for the meaning of citizenship and the state in India. If it does, India will do more than just secure its place as an economic power in the current century; it will also become a model for the social and political transformation of its neighbours in South Asia and beyond.

The author is a researcher in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge