Fee hikes and freeships

Apropos of my article, ‘Learning About Barriers’ (IE, February 6), I have received important feedback on the issue of the fee hike...

Apropos of my article, ‘Learning About Barriers’ (IE, February 6), I have received important feedback on the issue of the fee hike proposed by private unaided schools for complying with the recent Delhi High Court order to provide freeships on 25 per cent of seats, as required by the land allotment letter. I had suggested that private schools must stop indulging in extravagance. My additional suggestion for a fee hike was in the context of children belonging to wealthy families. A vast majority of students in such schools, however, belong to the middle class (including the lower middle class) and are already stretching themselves beyond their means to afford over-priced education.

The Justice Santosh Duggal Committee, as constituted by the Delhi High Court, submitted a report in July 1999 on the issue of fees in public schools. The report shows how these schools tended to “generally understate the surplus and/or overstate the deficit.” This was achieved by “resorting to over-provisioning under certain heads…diverting a part of the school revenue receipts to various funds usually created with the specific intention of temporarily parking the money…depreciating assets not owned by the school and simultaneously transferring equivalent amounts to the parent society…”

Transferring of funds to the parent society is a grave matter since the land was allotted at concessional rates to the parent societies (and not the schools) on philanthropic grounds. But the Committee found that “no ways and means are left untapped by them to turn the philanthropic activity like school education into a profitable venture in one form or the other.” There is, therefore, no rationale for fee hike whatsoever. The Supreme Court observed in a 1997 verdict: “Where the public property is being given to such institutions practically free…the conditions imposed should be consistent with public interest and should always stipulate that in case of violations of any of those conditions, the land shall be resumed by the government.”

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There are disturbing media reports that the Delhi state government is at present negotiating with the public school lobby to lower the percentage of seats for freeships from 25 to 10 per cent or even less under the pretext of making rules for admissions from the weaker sections of society. What right does the government have to even undertake such negotiations and that, too, with the violators of law? These negotiations, deplorable and unhealthy as they are, can be challenged in the court. The government is morally bound to withdraw from such negotiations forthwith and start consultations instead with parents’ groups belonging to the weaker sections of society for whose benefits these rules are supposedly being framed.

Let me conclude by quoting from the Justice Duggal Committee Report: “The issues involved being of far-reaching consequences to the society at large, affecting virtually every family drawn from all strata; it is imperative for those on whom the responsibility to administer rests, to wake up to the perils of apathy, indifference and defeatism and become alive to the dimensions of the problem.”

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