With the school admissions season having begun in Maharashtra, middle class parents across the state grouped under the banner of the All India Federation of Parents Association (AIFPA) have taken to the streets to protest against “management-friendly” tuition fee increases in private unaided schools recommended by the Kumud Bansal Committee. “We will be holding a meeting soon with school education minister Balasaheb Thorat. If the state government doesn’t scrap the Bansal Committee and form a statutory body giving balanced representation to parents and social workers besides school managements soon, we will move the high court,” M.S. Deshmukh, vice president of AIFPA, informed the media in Mumbai on January 6.
The 21-member Bansal Committee was constituted in June 2009 by the state government to recommend a tuition fees fixation process for the state’s 8,640 private unaided primary and secondary schools. Some schools had given notice of intent to raise tuition fees by 50 percent, citing necessity to pay teachers higher salaries recommended by the Sixth Pay Commission.
In October last year the Bansal Committee (which included represent-atives of the parents community) submitted a 50-page report to the state government. Upholding the right of private unaided school managements to determine their institutional fee structures, but to ensure that tuition fees are ‘reasonable’, the committee recommended a cap of 15 percent of revenue on permissible surplus. More-over it recommended a greater role for PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) to negotiate fee increases bilaterally with school managements.
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The commonsense recommendations of the Bansal Committee which have quite obviously drawn upon the verdicts of the Supreme Court in the T.M.A. Pai vs Union of India (2002 SCR 587) and P.A. Inamdar vs State of Maharashtra (2005) cases, which upheld the right of private unaided professional colleges to determine their tuition fees and admission processes provided they are reasonable, transparent and merit-based, have proved unpalatable to the AIFPA and middle class parents’ community in Maharashtra. They have called for outright rejection of the Bansal Committee’s report and determination of tuition fees by a state government-constituted board in which represent-atives of government, NGOs and social activists constitute a majority.
Comments Jayant Jain, president of the Mumbai-based Forum for Fairness in Education: “Private schools are licenced as charitable institutions and are given land, water and electricity at subsidised prices. Hence they must not be allowed to generate surpluses or profit.”
But following the verdicts of the Supreme Court in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation and P.A. Inamdar cases (cited above), this argument is of doubtful validity. “Although the Central and state governments can issue broad guidelines to formulate tuition fees, micro-management of privately promoted, financially independent schools is unlikely to be approved by the courts. They have the right to determine their own tuition fees subject to their being ‘reasonable’ given investment made in infrastructure, faculty and facilities,” opines Mumbai-based former journalist turned lawyer Rina Kamath, who has been active in public interest litigation for the past decade.
A principal of an upscale private unaided school, who upon being guaranteed anonymity, is scathing in her criticism of Mumbai’s “over-subsidised middle class”. “Accustomed to unmerited subsidies in electricity, water, higher education etc, these people want first world education for their children at third world prices. They want us to hire highly qualified teachers but don’t want to pay for them. They are too foolish to understand that by inviting government regulation of tuition fees in private schools, they are inviting backdoor nationalisation and dumbing down of India’s high quality unaided schools to government school standards.”
While they expect their children to do so, parents seldom learn.
Priyanka Agarwal (Mumbai)
ASER dampener
January is invariably a winter month of discontent for the grandly-titled Delhi-based Union ministry of human resource development and the education ministries of India’s 28 states and seven union territories, who between them run 1.25 million primary schools with an estimated annual budget of Rs.80,000 crore. Because that’s when the heavyweight Mumbai-based education NGO Pratham (estb. 1994) releases its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which measures the learning outcomes of children enroled in 1.1 million primary schools in 575 rural districts of India.
The annual ASER report, master-minded by Pratham and its promoter-chief executive Madhav Chavan in particular, and compiled by 30,000 volunteers (mainly higher secondary and undergraduate students) who fan out across rural India every October onwards, discomfits the government education establishment because 86 percent of rural primaries are run by the Central, state and local governments.
Inevitably as in the five years past since Pratham (annual budget: Rs.69.9 crore) started this valuable annual initiative in 2005, ASER 2009 doesn’t offer cheerful news. The percentage of class V children in government schools who can read class II texts has been static at 50 percent for the past four years. “This means that half of the children are at least three grade levels behind where they need to be,” says a Pratham spokesperson. The maths learning outcomes of children in government rural primaries is even worse, with the percentage of children in class V able to do simple division sums declining from 41 percent in 2007 to 36 percent in 2009.
Despite this, educationists in Maharashtra are inclined to see a silver lining. “The percentage of primary students in Maharashtra who cannot read a single English alphabet has dropped from 25 percent in 2007 to 16.7 percent in 2009,” says Swati Bandekar, ASER’s Maharashtra associate who reveals that the 2009 survey tested 50,000 students in all 33 districts of the state. “The most encouraging outcome for Maharashtra this year is that the state has exceeded the national average on almost every parameter,” she adds.
As a consequence of poor learning outcomes in Maharashtra’s government primaries, the flight to private schools has gathered momentum. “Private school attendance in the state rose to 28.2 percent of all students in the age group of six-14 in 2009, up from 18.3 percent in 2006,” reveals ASER 2009. Moreover given consistently falling academic standards in primary education, households are resorting to private tuition. In government schools patronised by Maharashtra’s poorest households, the percentage of children taking paid private tuition in class I is 17.1 percent, rising to 30.8 percent in class VIII.
“Parliament has recently passed the Right to Education Act. The question is whether the right to education will remain merely the ‘right to schooling’. Or whether we will actually provide our children with learning and real education,” says Madhav Chavan.
Good question.
Huned Contractor (Pune)