Corruption in Education Institutes:
 Fee Hikes, Forced Donations and Capitation Fees

Articles

Reports

Books

For the possibility of your child making it to the roll of a prestigious school may now depend on 'who spots the tailor first'. In a  fresh bid to evade the law, which prohibits demanding donations, many schools have clandestinely appointed agents to do the  dirty job. Therefore, nowadays, a school tailor or peon's job profile extends beyond altering uniforms and filing papers.

They are the new hawkeyed agents who hang around school premises, scouting for parents willing to dole out several  thousand rupees to secure seats for their children. What follows is a hectic round of  bargaining and surreptitious meetings with  the school trustees to secure the child's future. The hefty price tag that inevitably comes along with it is dismissed by parents as  a "necessary evil".

Most city schools demand donations, say principals. They come under different names some take money under  the guise of raising "development funds", others demand "deposits". "Trustees promise to return the deposit when a child passes out," says Vandana Lulla, principal of Anandilal Podar school,  Santa Cruz Schools thereby earn an interest on the capital and many managements do not hesitate to retain the deposits as  students' "parting gifts".  Others exploit loopholes in the anticapitation act. For instance, the act says no fund-raising should be done around admission time. "So schools issue receipts for deposits two months after the admission," says Mr Jain. Another common tactic is to squeeze parents by informing  them about impending repairs and buildings that need to be built. Money-raking may be an integral part of  the big business that education has now become, but several trustees say all's fair  while walking the financial tightrope to survive. 

Balancing the ledger is toughest for unaided schools which receive no government grants, says Mr Motlekar. Of the 465 English medium schools in the city, only 185 receive government aid.  A trustee of an 85-year-old education society that runs 19 schools - aided and unaided - in and around the city, lists the  reasons for seeking donations.  "Our expense for building repairs alone stands at over Rs 1.5 crore," says the trustee, who requested anonymity. Also, for the past three years, the state government hasn't disbursed the non-salary grant, which is used for meeting maintenance and other  daily expenses. "The government already owes us Rs 4 crore," says the trustee. 

Even unaided schools, which are supposed to recover costs through fees, have little respite. While fixing the fees, the  government does not consider the expenditure incurred on computers or laboratories, says a trustee, who admits that his  school asks parents "who can afford it" to contribute anything from Rs 1,000 to Rs 7,000 to a development fund. This seat-peddling, say educationists, is one problem for which there appears no easy solution. As Mr Motlekar points out, "It  may not be a right practice, but with parents willing to pay and schools willing to accept, there is little that the government can  do." He suggests that the government devise a method to allow schools to charge a reasonable amount to cover their  expenditure.

Taking serious note of complaints of self- financing private schools extracting huge amounts from parents during admission to nursery classes, the State Human Rights Commission has constituted a full bench to probe the charges. The bench will to hold meetings with authorities of State school education and the Central Board of Secondary Education.

The SHRC member, S. Sambandham, told The Hindu today that several oral complaints were received about private schools collecting heavy amounts in the guise of building fund, old boys/girls fund, PTA fund, library fund, etc. According to the Constitution, education upto the primary level was compulsory and upto the secondary level free of cost.

This is a story of high fees and falling ceiling fans. While parents battle to get their children in schools, pay high fees and suffer ever increasing demands from school manage-ments, Mumbai schools follow a strange bottom line. You pay, we do not deliver.

Every school: has a little story. Of how fees and other donations were extorted in the name of building funds, purchase of air-conditioners etc.  At the time of admission, Hindi Vidya Bhavan asked parents to pay between Rs 1,000 and Rs 5000, "We intend to fix airconditioners in the class to cut out the rail noise so that children can study in a bet-ter way," the parents were told by the management of the school, which stands beside Marine Lines railway station. Parents eventually ended up paying a Rs 5,000 inter-est- free deposit. In August, in the same school, a fan snapped off the ceiling in the standard VIII C classroom and came crashing down, damaging the tables and chairs. Fortunately, the fan fell a little before the stu-dents entered the class, it it would have landed right on them. "What does the school do with the Rs 200 it charges from stu-dents per month along with fees for building maintenance?" asks an infuriated parent, as he furnish-es a receipt from the school for He says, "The school earns Rs 4 lakh from rental charges, Rs 12 lakh from mobile phone operators for putting up transmitter beams. Rs 36 lakh from maintenance charges collected from students apart from the admission fee and other fees charged under various heads." 

...In many schools, the secondary section obtains aid from the govern-ment while the primary section is deliberately kept unaided. In the account maintained in unaided schools, the expenditure incurred for electricity, water connection and other such maintenance are shown in their accounts, even though both the primary and secondary sections are . housed in the same building and such expenditures would be compensat-ed by the state government under the grant.

For once, school managements in the city have got a firm rap on their knuckles. Hie directorate of education, reacting to strong protests from parents' associations, has directed 23 unaided schools to scale down their exorbitant fees and bring them down to the ceiling of fee hike imposed by the government in August. The state government had allowed schools a maximum hike of 50 per cent from their existing fee structure. However, most schools jumped the ceiling and implemented hikes to as much as 200 per cent. This was done even by highly reputed schools in the city like Utpal Sangvi and Hindi Vidya Bhavan, Marine Drive. Along with the rollback, the directorate has also allowed the school to col-lect Rs 25 extra per month to enable schools to pay arrears to teachers in accordance with the Fifth Pay Commission recom-mendations since January 1, 1996. Many schools had increased fees by 100-250 per cent after being asked to implement the recom-mendations.

On July 10, students of 172 government-aided, English medium schools brought down-town Mumbai to a standstill for five hours, choking traffic on several arterial roads. They were demanding that the government scrap its decision to implement a new income-based tuition fee structure. Soon after, the Democratic Front coalition government in Maha-rashtra put in abeyance its decision to hike fees in these government-aided, English medium schools. It was a decision in keeping with the Vilasrao Deshmukh government's flip-flop on the matter that first came to the fore last August. In March 2001, the school education department advocated a cut in grants to English medium schools, which prompted the govern-ment to propose a 50 per cent increase in fees of English medium schools in Mumbai and a 20 per cent hike for schools in other parts of the state. But the government was soon forced to retract after parents and academics protested because the fee hike did not extend to Marathi medium schools.

...School authorities accused the gov-ernment of discrimi-nating On the basis Of the medium of instruc-tion. They were also sceptical about whether the scheme would be implemented properly, since documents could be fudged or easily pro-cured.

Some principals felt the hike was too steep. Most students, they insisted, were from ' The proposal categorizes parents as income tax and non-income tax pay-ers and directs that fees be hiked accordingly' the lower-middle classes, and the hike would add to the parents' burden. Many schools already charge activity fees and other, similar fees from students, apart from the tuition fees that could work out to be as high as Rs 1,000 a year.

DUE TO strong opposition from Congress and NCP MLAs in the city, the school education department today decided to revise the proposal for a fee hike for aided English medium schools and do away with the controversial slab system for charging fees. In a meeting of city MLAs called by the School Education Minister Ramkrishna More, it was announced that the slab system based on the annual income of the parents of the students would be dropped.

Enough is enough. That seems to be the reaction of par-ents and educa-tionists to a series of moves by the state government to cut funding to the education sec-tor, the latest being its decision R. Pandey to reduce grant to aided English-medium schools in the city by 50 per cent. While sporadic protests have fol-lowed the government move, school authorities and parents are now all set to take it a step further, even establishing a Forum of Aided English-medium Schools to take up their cause.

VARUN Bhartiya was confident that he had answered every question correctly for his school admissions interview. He had practised for weeks: He knew his name, his father's job, his mother's job. So his mother was stunned when the prestigious private New Delhi school sent its icy rejection, declaring. "Your child was unable to perform according to the level of the school. Please do not make any further inquiries." Varun, at the age of three, had flunked his nursery-school entrance test, his first academic setback in a viciously competitive education system.

The middle-class hunger forbetter education also is fuelling an explosion in the number of private schools in a country where many parents are frustrated with government-funded schools' overcrowded classrooms, absentee teachers and poor curriculam.
In the last decade the number of private schools in New Delhi has doubled to some 600 — about 40% of the total schools in the city, according to government officials. But educators worry that while the middle class, which can afford private tuition, buys better education for its children, most Indian youngsters are subjected to government schools that are under funded and overburdened by burgeoning student population.

Although kindergarten is supposed to be a place for more fun and less learning, getting a seat in a good school is no child's play. Starting with interviews of parents and the child, the admissions procedure sometimes goes on to check even a parent's social standing and the size of his or her purse. "School authorities expect children to read and write," says Shirin Choksey, principal of Godrej Udayachal school, Vikhroli. A toddler is often subjected to gruelling interviews on the alphabet and nu-merals, topics that a child is expected to pick up at a later stage. Incidentally, the pre-primary act had done away with kindergarten from formal education, making it a play-school. The act had provided for banning donations and interviews, among other things. According to Ms Choksey, interviews and the preparations that go into it put a lot of pressure on the child. "It hampers the child's growth, the fact that you are concentrating only in one area, leaving no time for play or emotional and social development," she says.

...Bhagavanji Raiyani, president for the Forum for Fairness in Education, points out, a child does-n't even understand the meaning of the word 'interview'. And that is the key issue which many city school authorities have not been able to comprehend so far.