ACCESS TO JUSTICE TOWARDS THE CREATION OF INCLUSIVE SOCIAL ORDER A bare reading of this provision reveals the following four key points in terms of its implementation and full fructification: One, to provide education shall be the prime responsibility of the State. Two, this responsibility shall be discharged within a stipulated period of ten years from the date of commencement of the Constitution. Three, education shall be free and compulsory, that is, it shall not be a saleable commodity. Four, all this shall be accomplished by the State through the enactment of a proper law. A conjoint consideration of all the four identified counts of Article 45 un-mistakenly conveys the primacy that the founding fathers of the Constitution consciously accorded to the subject of education. Otherwise also, by all accounts, ‘education’ is a very well recognised and established strategy, tool, or contrivance, which can bear the burden of resolving all sorts of complex issues or problems – social, economic and political – and that too with a futuristic import! But, then, what did we do with the constitutional mandate of original Article 45? Nothing happened substantially for about next 50-60 years since the commencement of the Constitution in 1950, and mercifully the citizens had no power to force the State to fulfil its obligation under Article 45, as the directive provisions contained in Part IV are not enforceable in any court of law. And this is in contra-distinction with the Fundamental Rights enshrined in Part III, which are enforceable in the court of law.73 Could we call it a monumental institutional failure of the State to realise the objective of Article 45 as mandated by the Constitution? Nearly, after more than four decades since the inauguration of the Constitution, there came a humane and benevolent intervention by the Judiciary. The Supreme Court, through constitutional interpretation, read the obligation of the State to provide ‘free and compulsory education to all children’ under Article 45 within the ambit of Fundamental Right contained in Article 21, which guarantees to all citizens ‘protection of life and personal liberty’.74 This has been done by the Court by holding ingeniously that that the term ‘life’ under Article 21 means ‘life with dignity’, which comes only with the provision of education as visualised 73 74 See generally, supra, Part II. Article 21, which mandates that “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law,” is perhaps the most productive source of protecting human rights innovatively. 17