Since the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights over 50 years ago, there has been a proliferation of international conventions on rights. Human rights are regarded as worth of respect and protection but there are plenty of gaps in translating internationally recognized human rights into entitlement for people in countries' national legislation. Even though worries about such negative gaps have been expressed, few analyses of the conditions which enable the realization of rights have been carried out. This is what this paper proposes to do in the case of education by asking the following key research questions: Does the new Right to Education (RTE) legislation matter for the realization of education rights for the children of India?