Hyderabad: Despite several Supreme Court and High Court judgments stating that schools were not to hike fees without proper instructions from Fee Regulatory Committees of the state, private schools have been increasing their fees. There has been a consistent hike in school fee structures from 20 per cent to 30 per cent each year, burdening the parents.
The fee hike problem is evident across the country in all private schools in various states. A petition has also been filed through Change.org, appealing to the Ministry of Human Resource Development. The petition has managed to collect signatures of more than two lakh from various people across the country.
Anubha Sahai, the petitioner, in the petition mentioned, “The profiteering and commercialisation of education must stop. As a mother I have struggled with the fee hike myself. As a lawyer, I have been fighting court cases on behalf of these aggrieved parents.”
Although there is a fee regulatory committee in Telangana, the case is entirely different in the state, said one of the committee members of the Tirupati Rao Fee Regulatory Committee of 2017, N. Narayana, who represented parents associations.
The committee which was supposed to regulate the fee structure had permitted all the private schools to have a blanket hike of 10 per cent. However, this was vehemently opposed by the parents associations, after which the Telangana government released a memo, not to implement the recommendations until further orders. But, private managements went to court and got a stay order on that too, gaining the power to increase the fees. After two years, there has been only one hearing re-garding the matter till date.
