Hyderabad: There seems to be no end to the ‘fee war’. Despite the long-drawn-out battle against the school fee hike by the Hyderabad Parents’ School Association, there is another 30 per cent fee hike on cards in the upcoming academic year.
Parents say that in spite of sending 2,000 post cards to Telangana state Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, they didn’t get any response from the state government till now, as the fee hike issue is not on their priority list.
Not even a single report has been made public, in spite of the commissoner and director of school Education G. Kishan himself saying that schools are profiteering with 50-70 per cent of the school fees. Parents said that they are not going to stop their agitation, in fact they will intensify it until their voices are heard and something concrete is done about the fee hike. Parents are very upset now as they feel the school fees have been rising at a much faster rate than their average earnings and they will be unable to withstand the hefty increase.
Many parents from Hyderabad are raising the issue of private schools charging heavy fees from students, which they are unable to afford.
Parents are demanding that fee hikes should be kept under control and regulations on fee hikes should be made effective from the 2017-18 academic year.
HSPA member Pavan Reddy said, “A 30 per cent fee hike is too much to bear and what makes this worse is the recurrence without any justification.
I am sure there are many examples. Quantum of fee hike is just one side of the story, there are untold stories of how the lives of parents are being negatively impacted because of unjustified school fee hikes.
Like the one recently reported about a traffic cop Javed, who works as a home guard in the day time and an auto driver at night. Then there’s the mother who had to sell her mangalsutra to keep both her kids going to school.’’
He added, “We are pinning our hopes on Prof, Tirupati Rao committee for a stringent district fee regulatory committee set-up where these kind of unjustified fee hikes will be kept under check. We also demand that all this be made effective from this academic year itself.’’
HSPA member Seema Agarwal said, The recommendations to from a district fee regulatory committee were submitted on December 31, 2016. We were waiting to hear something positive. Instead of that the government announced the formation of a committee to check the pros and cons of DFRC and made other recommendations, which were supposed to be for this academic year.”
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She said, “In a recent review meeting, Deputy Chief Minister Kadiam Srihari had met all district education officers, but they discussed everything except fee issues. Not even a single concrete action has been taken in response to the complaints from HSPA as well as the common public’’. Mr Praveen Raju, president, Independent School Management Association, said, “We always suggest to schools not to impose a steep hike in fees as we don’t want the parents to get burdened unnecessarily.
Ultimately we are here because of parents. We also understand the problems of the parents, as it will be difficult for them to pay huge amounts of fees to educate their children. We always suggest to schools not to increase fees more then 10 per cent to 15 per cent every academic year. I understand there are a few schools who have increased the fees beyond the acceptable range, which is not appropriate’’.
