Schools must follow law on fee structure, says Manish Sisodia

New Delhi: Delhi deputy chief minister on Thursday said that schools have to be a charity system in the country and maintain a transparency in the institutions.

Speaking at an education conclave, Mr Sisodia asserted that while the government will not intervene in the schools producing the best brains in the country, it will surely intervene in not letting the parents fleeced by the private schools as they have to follow the law in keeping a fee structure in place.

“The schools can hire the best teachers from across the world, but they have to be transparent when they decide the fees structure,” he said adding that the government cannot allow the schools to hike the fees arbitrarily. The AAP government had early this year ordered the private schools in Delhi to roll back the “arbitrary” fee hike.

Checking the arbitrary hike in school fees was one of the main promises of the AAP government. Speaking on the challenges facing the education sector, Mr Sisodia said that the country has hugely mistaken the education system for human resource development. But education is actually a 360-degree approach towards the development of humans. “The basic question I faced from the government school teachers was that proper infrastructure was not in place. Even though the Right to Education is in place, which mandates the teacher student ratio of one is to 40, many government schools in the national Capital have batch sizes much larger and extending to 170 students in a single batch. In such cases, it is impossible to impart quality education.”  “So we decided to work on the infrastructure first. Once that took off, we started to work on the training of the teachers, since the world class infrastructure requires trained teachers to impart education,” he added.