Article 21A is a provision of the Indian Constitution that establishes the Right to Education as a Fundamental Right. This right was inserted into Part III of the Constitution by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, which received the President's assent on December 12, 2002. The amendment was a legislative response to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Right to Life in Article 21, particularly in the landmark case of Unni Krishnan, J.P. vs. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993), where the Court ruled that the Right to Education for children up to the age of 14 flows from Article 21.
The provision mandates that "The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine". This made the State legally obligated to ensure elementary education, solving the problem of the right being non-justiciable when it was only a Directive Principle under the original Article 45. To operationalize this constitutional guarantee, the Parliament enacted the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act), which came into force on April 1, 2010.
The 86th Amendment also made two connected changes: it substituted the original Article 45 to focus on early childhood care and education for children below the age of six years, and it inserted Article 51A(k), making it a Fundamental Duty for every parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education to their child between the ages of six and fourteen years. The core of Article 21A has remained unchanged since its insertion, but the RTE Act, 2009 has been subject to judicial review, such as in Pramati Educational and Cultural Trust v. Union of India (2014), which clarified that minority educational institutions are not obligated to adhere to the 25% reservation for disadvantaged groups under the Act.