Which Constitutional Amendment has added Fundamental Right to Free and Compulsory Education of Children between the age of 6 to 14 years ?

Question

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Correct — C, the 86th Amendment. The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserted Article 21A, which makes free and compulsory education for all children aged 6 to 14 years a Fundamental Right. The same amendment did three things at once: it added Article 21A to Part III, rewrote Article 45 (the Directive Principle now speaks of early childhood care and education for children below six years), and added Article 51A(k), a Fundamental Duty on a parent or guardian to provide education opportunities to a child between 6 and 14. The right became enforceable only when the enabling law — the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 — came into force on 1 April 2010.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not an education amendment. The 68th Amendment belongs to the 1991 batch dealing with the extension of President's Rule in Punjab — a wholly different subject, and eleven years before Article 21A existed.  (b) The 85th Amendment (2001) amended Article 16(4A) to give SC/ST government servants 'consequential seniority' on promotion, with retrospective effect from 1995. It is a reservation-in-promotion amendment, not an education one.  (d) The 87th Amendment (2003) changed the census basis for readjusting parliamentary and assembly constituencies from the 1991 census to the 2001 census. It sits immediately next to the 86th in number, which is exactly why it is offered here.

Concept: Article 21A is the only Fundamental Right that was added to Part III by a constitutional amendment rather than being written into the Constitution in 1950. Before it, the Supreme Court had already read a right to education into Article 21 (Unni Krishnan, 1993), and education for children up to 14 sat only in Article 45 as a non-justiciable Directive Principle. The 86th Amendment converted that promise into an enforceable right for the 6–14 age band and pushed the under-six commitment back into Part IV.

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