School Fee Loot: Categorisation of private schools for fee regulation sought

• The fee should be based on infrastructure, teachers and facilities
• There should be a maximum cap or upper limit for school fee
• The fee should be fixed for a minimum 3 academic years

Hyderabad: With the new Government in place, the demand of parents to implement the fee regulation mechanism is increasing. The parents who have been fighting a relentless battle in the last ten years to see that the fee regulation mechanism was in place are upset that the previous BRS government did not take any steps in that direction.

The Andhra Pradesh Education Act stipulates that every school should have a parents committee. The Telangana government which adopted the same act also has a proviso to constitute parents committee. But it was never implemented. There were several meetings of the parents associations with the authorities but all that they got were empty promises. The parents are now demanding the new government to come up with a concrete time bound plan to regulate the private school fees. They told Hans India that already the season for admissions had begun and the government needs to act fast.

As of now, there is no scientific approach adopted by the schools and fees are increased as per their whims, allege parents and parent associations like HSPA.

The HSPA has been demanding for categorisation of schools as it has been done in the case of professional colleges for the fixation of different fee structures under the supervision of the Telangana Admissions and Fee Regulatory Committee (TAFRC). In the absence of such categorisation, utilising the loopholes in the law, private schools were resorting to profiteering in the state. In the absence of fee regulation, parents are at the receiving end.

What HSPA wants is categorisation of schools based on their infrastructure and faculty. Fix the maximum upper limit which should be subject to scrutiny by the State Level School Fee Regulation Committee (SLFRC). They further say that the fee should be fixed for three academic years.

K Venkat Sainath, joint secretary of HSPA, said, this year we have filed a contempt case against the government for not implementing a fee regulation mechanism despite court orders. But the previous government despite forming a fee regulation committee, has re-printed what was in Andhra Pradesh Education Act (APEA).