From lottery draw to courtroom: A child’s fight for a school seat in Gurgaon

The reason cited by the school: Reyansh’s home was more than 3 km from the school, and therefore did not meet the neighbourhood criteria under Haryana’s Right to Education rules.

The family decided to move court.

What followed was Rajpal’s two-month-long legal battle, until a district court in Gurgaon, earlier this week, ordered the school to admit the boy within 15 days.

The Indian Express has reached out to the school for a comment.

In an order on August 18, Additional District Judge Dr Gagan Geet Kaur questioned the manner in which EWS children were being denied seats even after being allotted the same through the state’s own system. The court described such rejections as “tactics to deprive the children of weaker sections of society from education so that they could not get education along with children of elite society in private schools…”.

The order was the result of Rajpal’s fight that began at the lower court.

He had initially approached the Civil Judge (Junior Division), seeking an interim mandatory injunction directing the school to admit his son immediately. On July 13, the plea was dismissed on the grounds that it would amount to granting the primary relief claimed in the suit before the trial concluded.

The family then moved the district court.

Advocate Jaljeet Thurana, who represented the family, told The Indian Express, “The boy belongs to a poor family. The father is the only breadwinner and does odd jobs. We had to appeal after the lower court ruled in the school’s favour.”

The district court overturned the lower court’s decision citing a recent Supreme Court judgment that held that a private school cannot sit in appeal over the decision of the competent state authority or withhold admissions on its own assessment of eligibility once the government has scrutinised and allotted seats.

Before the district court, the school had argued that during scrutiny, the boy’s residential address was found to not satisfy the neighbourhood distance criteria outlined under the Haryana Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Rules, and that the rejection was strictly in line with departmental guidelines.

It had argued that the provisional computerised draw did not confer any “absolute, vested or indefeasible right” on the child.

Dismissing this, the court noted a “procedural lapse” – the state’s admission application portal did not automatically restrict or filter school choices based on residential addresses. “It cannot be expected from the applicant, belonging to such section of society that he would know the definition of neighbourhood area/neighbourhood school,” the court observed.

“Rather, when he fills his resident address in the form, then automatically the options of schools in the neighbourhood of his residence should be shown in application gorm to opt any of school of his choice in such neighbourhood area. This procedural lapse fails the objective of RTE Act, 2009. The trial court has overlooked this aspect while rejecting application,” the order said.

During the proceedings, the counsel for the school submitted that 45 students had been allotted seats under the RTE quota by the Education department. Yet, after verification of documents, only one had been admitted.

Among the 45, the school said it had rejected 16 allotted candidates on the grounds of distance.

The court observed that statutory mandates are “indirectly being defeated when only one admission is granted out of 45 allotted seats”.

It also highlighted a May 5, 2026 directive issued by the Directorate of Elementary Education, Haryana, which had reprimanded private unaided recognised schools over complaints that they were delaying or refusing admissions on untenable grounds.