It speaks volumes about the supervisory dedication and competence of the Karnataka state government’s education ministry that on December 23, 1,266 primary-secondary schools in Bangalore, some of them over a century old, were declared “illegal” by the department of public instruction (DPI).
A list published by the DPI declares the pre-primary sections of over 50 of the city’s top-ranked CBSE and CISCE affiliated schools including Bishop Cotton Boys (estb. 1865), Bishop Cotton Girls and St. Joseph’s Boys schools unauthorised and illegal.
According to a DPI task force constituted by the education ministry following the rape of a three-year-old girl child of Orchids International School, Jalahalli, last October, the 1,266 transgressor schools with an aggregate enrollment of 300,000 students, are guilty of several violations: running pre-primary/upper primary classes without permission, violation of the state’s language policy, and falsely claiming affiliations with the pan-India CBSE/CISCE examination boards. Mohammad Mohsin, commissioner of public instruction, says notices will shortly be issued to the accused schools.
Private unaided school managements listed for running pre-primary sections ‘illegally’ contend that pre-primary schools are not subject to government approvals and regulation. However DPI spokespersons make a distinction between composite K-12 schools and independent unitary preschools with the former obliged to obtain government permission. Moreover, the confusion is confounded by the list including schools indicted for starting primaries in English-medium which allegedly violates the state’s language policy mandating Kannada or mother tongue as the compulsory medium of instruction.
According to DPI sources, as per a 1994 ordinance of the state government, all primaries promoted after that year were obliged to use Kannada or the mother tongue as the medium of instruction. Therefore, these schools are also illegal, despite a judgement of the Karnataka high court in 2008 having quashed the 1994 ordinance as being violative of parents’ fundamental right to choose the medium of instruction of their children, and the Supreme Court upholding this verdict in May 2014.
“Although the Supreme Court has quashed the 1994 language policy ordinance, the education department obstinately refuses to accord post-1994 English-medium private unaided schools — most of which are affiliated with the Karnataka state education board — formal recognition. This is contempt of court. Instead of defaming school managements and causing anxiety among parents, it’s time the state government accepts the court’s verdict, and sets up a transparent and fair process of recognition. Otherwise schools will have no option but to knock on the court’s doors again,” warns D. Shashi Kumar, general secretary, Associated Management of English Medium Schools in Karnataka (KAMS), which has a membership of 600 private schools statewide.
“The private schools associations’ triumph on the medium of instruction issue has substantially diluted the power of the educracy and the state’s politicians to extract rents and sell vernacular language textbooks to private unaided schools through front companies. Insistence that composite unaided schools apply separately for registration of their pre-primaries even as garage preschools don’t have to register themselves, is nothing but an excuse to harass, extort and punish. The state’s utterly corrupt educracy long accustomed to extracting rents from primary schools ‘illegally’ teaching in English has suffered a severe setback, to which they cannot reconcile. Hence, its insistence of licensing,” says a Bangalore-based education consultant who preferred to remain anonymous.
Instead of monitoring and regulating private schools which are clearly preferred to Karnataka’s 46,030 government schools which are experiencing a continuous exodus, the DPI would be well-advised to regulate its educracy which because of its greed, is inviting contempt of court proceedings.
Prayank (Bangalore)