Chennai: The Madras high court has directed the Amritha Vidyalayam School, affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education, in Coimbatore, not to compel the parents of the students studying the school to buy accessories except Textbooks and Notebooks.
Justice C.V.Karthikeyan gave the directive on a petition from M.Hemalatha and S.Vijayababu, which sought to direction to Amritha Vidyalayam School, run by the Matha Amirthandamayl Charitable Trust, to issue textbooks and notebooks without requiring parents to buy accessories for the forthcoming academic year 2019-2020.
In his interim order, the judge said the school can sell books necessary for the students, but, for accessories there cannot be compulsion to purchase them except uniform and shoes. Matter will be examined in detail on June 10, the judge added.
Petitioner’s counsel M.Purushothaman submitted that the petitioners’ children were studying in the school. This year, the school has issued a circular insisting the parents to pay Rs 5,500 towards textbooks and notebooks and Rs 5,000 towards accessories and materials which means shoes, socks, lunch bag etc., If the parents were permitted to buy them from open market, they could procure good quality materials for their children at affordable price. The materials supplied by the school were sub-standard and exorbitantly priced, he alleged.
He said the requirement to buy new books every year was against environment and ecology. If children use used books, there need not be printing of huge quantities of books. More new books will cause more damage to trees and ecology. The school was cornering the parents to buy new shoe that was strangely brown in colour and sports shoe from the new academic year.
Universally school going children wear black shoes and white shoes for sports purposes whereas the school had devised a new method to introduce an odd looking brown colour shoe and sports shoes with the only intention that parents cannot buy elsewhere.
There was no need to buy shoes at the beginning of the academic year. Buying it once again just to enable the school sell them was colossal wastage of resources, he added.
