Quite obviously the control-and-command obsessed education bureaucracy in Karnataka is determined to tighten rather than relax, its iron grip over the education sector in the state. Stung by high court and Supreme Court verdicts, which recently struck down its retrograde proposal to make Kannada or vernaculars the compulsory medium of instruction for children enroled in classes I-V in private unaided schools, the state’s politico-bureaucratic nexus has now targeted upscale private unaided CISCE, CBSE and international schools.
“The government will soon bring in a law to regulate the fees of private unaided schools. We will approach the Centre for certain clarifications in this regard,” education minister Visweshwar Hegde Kageri informed the state’s legislative assembly on July 22. Earlier, in 2006, the Karnataka education department had constituted a committee to regulate the admission processes and fees levied by pre-primary schools.
Pre-primary and K-12 private schools apart, the government is also intent upon regulating the tuition fees of private unaided colleges and institutions of professional education. The new vice chancellor of Bangalore University, Dr. A.N. Prabhudeva has threatened to disaffiliate private colleges charging “high fees”. “As we cannot cancel affiliations, now I have decided to take it up as a challenge to initiate disaffiliation proceedings against erring colleges,” he said in a press statement.
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These comments which are common within the state’s educracy, are indicative of chronic ignorance of the basic laws of economics on the part of education officials. “Tuition fees are calculated on the basis of infrastructure investment, teacher training, fees payable to affiliation boards and costs of providing pastoral care to students. They aren’t fixed arbitrarily, or on perceived capacity to pay basis. A talk-n-chalk school obviously has lower costs and hence can charge low tuition fees. It’s absurd to believe in the concept of normative tuition fees,” explains Anu Monga, principal of the Bangalore International School and chairperson of TAISI (The Association of International Schools of India).
If government officials tend to be ignorant of pricing economics, parents from within the great Indian middle class tend to be even more so. It’s pertinent to note that the state government’s proposal to regulate and cap tuition fees charged by private schools has the overwhelming support of the parents’ community. “Most parents are badly educated themselves. They’ll never understand that rising fees and the annual rush for admission into English medium private schools is because of corruption-driven licence-permit-quota raj in government, which restricts the supply of new private schools,” says the principal of an upscale K-12 school which receives 5,000 applications annually against 45 vacancies.
Curiously, despite witnessing the huge mess that five decades of licence-permit-quota raj has created in industry and higher education, middle class India’s parents community believes that government controls and regulation of K-12 education will work to their advantage rather than to the advantage of the democratic world’s most corrupt bureaucracy.
It’s a telling indicator of the poor quality education they themselves received.
Summiya Yasmeen (Bangalore)