Parents across India join hands to fight fee hikes in pvt schools

BENGALURU: Parents across many Indian cities have organised themselves to fight against private schools over unregulated fee hikes in the last three or four months.

They have staged protests against schools in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kerala and recently, in Hyderabad. In many cities, the school fee issue has reached judicial corridors this year. The Hyderabad School Parents’ Association (HSPA) received support from parents across India when they launched a “missed call campaign” last month. The association gave a call to all parents to dial a number on a given day if they wanted fee to be regulated.

It reportedly received 1.3 lakh calls, of which 17,800 were from Delhi, 14,994 from Maharashtra and 10,550 from Karnataka, reflecting the kind of frustration that parents across the country are probably experiencing.

In Bengaluru, while a group of parents is already fighting it out in court, the newly-formed Karnataka School Parents Association (KASPA), too, has decided to file a public interest litigation in the high court, demanding school fee regulation. They are up in arms against schools for hiking fees by 20-30%. FEE DOUBLED IN 5 YEARS

In 2012, a private unaided CBSE school was set up in an area in Bengaluru where a majority of IT employees live. The fee was `45,000 per annum and affordability was one of the factors that influenced parents’ choice.

This academic year (2016-17), the same school has imposed an annual tuition fee of `82,000, almost twice what it used to charge four years ago.

“We are unhappy over the ways in which schools are manipulating parents by hiking admission and transportation fees every year. The CBSE and ICSE by-laws clearly state that the school management should consult parents through chosen parents’ representatives before revising the fee. But we are not convinced about the selection process of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) itself. Often, parents are unaware of the PTA selection process and are never informed about it,” KASPA vicepresident Selvaraj says.

Karnataka, like several other states, has not fixed any fee limit for schools. In 2014, the department of public instruction drafted a policy to fix the fee per student in Bengaluru schools. But the draft reportedly received 7,000 objections and suggestions from the public and was shelved.

The proposal received strong opposition from school managements. “The government and parents consider just the salaries and maintenance cost while calculating the fee, but what about the initial establishment cost?” Dr M Srinivasan, founder-chairperson of GEAR International School in Bengaluru, asks.

“There is no criteria to measure the establishment cost,” K Satyanarayan, director at Chennai-based New Horizon Media Pvt Ltd and an education blogger, says.

This story has been published through an arrangement with Oorvani Foundation/

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