Regulatory Landscape for School Education for Third Gender Pupils in India: Case-Studies from CBSE, ICSE and UP Board in India

Aims: Third-gender people in India face discrimination in all aspects of life - social participation, education, job etc. Good education can be a tool to fight against this discrimination but the educational system is usually not very inclusive when it comes to third-gender persons. In this paper, the researchers present an analysis from their survey of the regulatory landscape (laws, policies, guidelines, …) of India in the context of school-level education for third-gender pupils. The paper also presents a brief overview of the international standards to set the scene.

Methodology: Systematic survey of regulation, policy and guideline documents in India for School-level Education.

Results: The analysis indicates that despite the legal recognition of third-gender persons in India and “inclusive education” being one of the central themes of all national-level policies, there is still a lack of concrete guidelines about implementing inclusive education, specifically for third-gender pupils. Furthermore, the guideline documents from three big educational boards in India (CBSE, ICSE and UP board) don’t contain any guideline for inclusion of third-gender pupils. Even the language of the guideline documents themselves was found to be non-inclusive for people of non-binary gender.

Implications and Conclusions: Based on the analysis, the researchers found the gaps in the regulatory landscape of India for inclusion of third-gender pupils and provided recommendations for improving the regulatory landscape in India for school-level education of third-gender persons and also for making the language of these (or others) regulatory documents more inclusive.