For India's Poor, a School Under a Railway Bridge Their classroom is a flattened patch of dirt and rocks under the elevated rail tracks. Their blackboards are rectangles painted on a chipped concrete wall. Their teacher is a shop owner with no formal training, but a conviction that education is their only hope. For some of these dozens of children of poor migrant workers in India's capital, this makeshift, open-air school under the rumble of mass transit is the only school they have. Others who attend overcrowded and dismal government schools come here as well - to actually learn. India's Right To Education Act promising free, compulsory schooling to all children ages 6 to 14 was supposed to take full effect March 31, but millions of children still don't go to school and many who do are getting only the barest of educations. So every morning, more than 50 children gather under the bridge for two hours of lessons at Rajesh Kumar's informal school. They sweep the dirt flat and roll out foam mats to sit on, just meters (yards) from the bushes were several men had been squatting and defecating minutes earlier. The students, ages 4 to 14, study everything from basic reading and writing to the Pythagorean Theorem. Those who also attend government schools say classrooms there are packed and that teachers, when they show up, just come in, write a problem on the board, and leave. "They teach much better here," said Raju, 12, the child of flower pickers. He also attends fifth grade at a government school in a class with 61 other students. There "they hardly teach anything," he said. Under the Right to Education Act, passed in 2010, enrollment has increased from 193 million to 199 million, and the government has invested more than $11 billion extra dollars in upgrading the school system. Still, about 3 million children remain out of school, according to the government; Private groups put that number at about 8 million. There also remain at least 700,000 teacher vacancies, and many of those who are employed don't have the proper training, according to the government. Despite the new investments, schools appear to be getting worse. According to the 2012 report by the non-profit education group Pratham, nearly 68 percent of third graders in government schools can't read at a first-grade level, up 10 percent from two years ago. Math proficiency had similarly plummeted, according to the report, which is based on assessments of about 700,000 children across the country. The government needs to focus not just on hiring new teachers and building new schools but on providing a good education to Indian children, said Rukmini Banerji, a Pratham official. "It looks like we are far from getting there," she said. Government officials say their own surveys show some improvement, though overall learning levels remain low. "The rapid expansion of primary education and introduction of a large number of first-generation learners in the school system has posed a major challenge for learning outcomes," India's Human Resource Development Minister M. Mangapati Pallam Raju told Parliament last month. Kumar's school under a bridge stands as proof of the hunger for learning among those either left out of the system or disappointed by it.