Hyderabad: City schools have not bothered to submit fee details to the office of the Hyderabad District Education Officer for the last three years. The last time they had submitted fee details was in June 2011.
Ironically, the official website of the Hyderabad DEO displays the fee details of 2011, which is of no use to parents and students. Even then, only a few schools, that too from the middle and lower rung, had submitted details and none of the prominent schools offering CBSE, ICSE and SSC curriculum figure in the 2011 list.
The fees in most of these schools have more than doubled since then.
Admissions for the coming academic year have already commenced and the seats in all the prominent schools are either booked or filled against norms. Rules stipulate that admissions have to be made only from January. Despite the managements of private schools openly flouting the norms, the Hyderabad district administration is turning a blind eye.
Private schools were forced to submit fee details to the government for the first time in 2011 following strict instructions from the then Hyderabad collector Natarajan Gulzar. He took special measures to regulate fees in private schools after complaints of indiscriminate fee hikes.
However, after his transfer in 2012, the district administration has taken no initiative on this front yet. Private schools exploited this to their advantage and started hiking fees at their will in the absence of regulations.
In 2011, it was made mandatory for schools to seek the approval of the Parents Teachers Associations (PTA) for any fee hike proposal. Several schools were forced to set up PTAs for the first time, which have now become dysfunctional due to the negligence of the district administration. Hyderabad district education officer A. Subba Reddy, however, said that notices would be sent to all schools to submit fee details for the coming academic year before the end of the current academic year in April and the same would be displayed on the website by May.
“We have received complaints against schools for resorting to unjustified fee hikes. A hike based on inflation is allowed, but it has come to our notice that some schools have hiked fees by as much as 40 per cent. I will take up the issue with the Collector and take action accordingly,” he said.
