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A wave of parents protesting against school fee hikes hits the nation.
The last 3-4 months has seen plenty of action in the Indian edu sector. Parents have been protesting loudly over fee hikes by schools. Schools have been justifying the same as cost of services rendered. The problem lies in the difference in attitude of schools and govt over profit making.
In probably the first time in the annals of educational history in India parents have organised themselves and galvanised against private schools over unregulated fee hikes during the last 3-4 months.
This phenomena is observed across the nation with protests beings staged against schools in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kerala and recently, in Hyderabad. In many cities, this issue has even reached judicial corridors.
Most notably among the parent associations is the Hyderabad School Parents’ Association (HSPA) which received tremendous support from parents across India, when they launched a “missed call campaign” last month. The association exhorted all parents to dial a number on a given day if they wanted school 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, clearly reflecting the massive wave of frustration that parents across the country are probably experiencing.
“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 vice-president Selvaraj says.
Like many other states, Karnataka has not fixed any limit for school fees. It is notable that in 2014, the department of public instruction had drafted a policy to fix the fee per student in Bengaluru schools. However, the draft had reportedly received 7,000 objections and suggestions from the public and eventually the draft was shelved. In fact, the proposal also received equally strong opposition from school managements.
Dr M Srinivasan, founder-chairperson of GEAR International School in Bengaluru, asks. “The government and the parents consider just the salaries and maintenance cost while calculating the fee, but what about the initial establishment cost?”
Let us look closely at the establishment cost incurred by a school.
“There is no single criteria to measure the establishment cost,” K Satyanarayan, director at Chennai-based New Horizon Media Pvt Ltd and an education blogger, says.
One of the biggest components of a school’s initial expenditure is the cost of land. For example, if the land was purchased at market value or taken on a lease, the management will most likely have the burden of a loan incurred to purchase or take it on lease.
If the private school has obtained the land at a concessional rate then, of course, it is even easier for the school to make a substantial profit.
“In Bengaluru, the Bangalore Development Authority reserves land for educational institutions, but how much of it is actually sanctioned to schools?” D Shashi Kumar, general secretary of the Karnataka State Private School Managements’ Association and the founder of Blossoms School, asks.
According to him, the government used to sanction land in the past for educational institutions, but that has not happened in a decade or so. This means that most schools and educational institutes opened in the last few years have been on privately purchased land at market value.
According to Jayaraman S, a chartered accountant who used to audit private schools in Delhi and is a governing body member of several schools, the Delhi government sanctions land to private school managements at a relatively cheap Rs 45 lakh per acre.
The next head of expenditure is the cost incurred to build the school and provide infrastructural facilities.
This brings us to the question of schools making “reasonable surplus.” The Indian law makes it mandatory for educational institutions to be registered under the Indian Societies Registration Act or Indian Trusts Act. This means that fortunately or unfortunately these institutions are herded in the category of non-profit organisations.What is Reasonable surplus?
However, what complicates matters further is that in various court cases, the apex court has adjudged that educational institutions do have the freedom to make a reasonable surplus. However, the court was clear that there cannot be any profiteering in education and any surplus fee collected should be used only for the school’s development activities or expansion plans.
Regulations and litigation
It is not that states do not have any rules governing fee collection and implementation. In fact, every state has its own fee regulation policy for schools. But the policy itself has become a bone of contention between schools and parents.
Though the Andhra Pradesh high court in 2010 limited the admission fee for private schools to Rs 5,000 per student and that the order was enforced in the same year, still parents in Hyderabad claim that schools have been violating these norms.
“Schools collect non-refundable admission fees, ranging anywhere between Rs 25,000 to Rs 2,50,000,” Seema Agarwal, an executive member of HSPA, says.
In Mumbai, Private Schools of Maharashtra (PoP SoM) is a group that’s fighting unjustified fee hikes. The Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Regulation of Fee) Act allows for a 15% fee hike once in two years, but parents allege that schools have been hiking their fee every year.
Chennai is the only major city that hasn’t seen any major outbreaks due to this issue. The reason is The Tamil Nadu Schools (Regulation and Collection of Fees) Act, 2009, which paved the way for the establishment of the Private School Fee Fixation Committees, who calculated fees based on the school’s locality, the strength of students, classes of study and status of the school.
However, even in Chennai, certain CBSE and ICSE schools approached the Supreme Court questioning the powers of the Fee Fixation Committee, leading to the issue of an interim order by the Supreme Court in January 2016.
The interim order removed the teeth of the Act by stating that the committees are limited to only verifying the fee collected by schools and checking if it is commensurate with the facilities provided; they could not impose any fee ceiling.
Lack of clarity
Satyanarayan feels that the problem lies in the ambiguity on what is allowable and non-allowable expenditure for schools.
Dissecting the Chennai model, he says even that Act is not devoid of faults. He pointed out 2 faults in it. First, the policy doesn’t leave any scope for the schools to experiment. For example, according to the RTE Act, the student-teacher ratio per class should be 30:1. But if a school tries to improve educational outcomes by deploying more teachers, the committee considers it as inflating the expense.
Secondly, the members of the committee are not qualified auditors, but officers of the education department. “They cannot actually gauge the cost and expense of the school,” Satyanarayan observes.
He believes that the problem lies in the absence of a separate authority to regulate the education sector and emphasises that fee regulation has to be viewed holistically.
Whatever the outcome of the recent skirmishes, it seems it will lead to a major restructuring in the ways schools are recognised in the eyes of the law and the expectations parents carry from schools. Who knows, it may actually be the point of inflection where the government schools may see resurgence and even the government may play an active part in resuscitating them.