State education minister Vinod Tawde appears to have heeded the cries of parents of school going children in the city.
No educational institution will be allowed to reap unreasonable profits and no school affiliated to the ICSE or CBSE boards will be allowed to coerce students into buying textbooks from the school. Tawde, who made these promises on Monday, has also vowed to make relevant changes in the act that governs school fees in the state. Tawde gave these assurances at a meeting called at the Balmohan Vidyamandir School in Dadar, attended by PTA representatives as well as representatives of school managements.
Tawde also instructed the state education department to ensure that all procedures in schools are recorded on video, to enable better complaint redressal.
The Educational Institutions (Regulation of Collection of School Fee) Act governing school fees has a few deficiencies that do not allow parents to get effective redressal in case of complaints. The committee that has been set up by the state government to probe the fee hike issue will hear parents' complaints in a meeting scheduled for next week.
Mumbai Live was the first to report that a committee has been set up to look into the long pending demands of parents to check unreasonable school fee hikes.
The spokesperson for the PTAs, Jayashree Deshpande told Mumbai Live on Monday that school fees have been hiked from 15 to 50 per cent without taking parents into confidence. The pressure to buy books from the schools has also not eased so far.
Tawde told the meeting that all schools would be asked to declare the procedure of the appointment of the PTA committees. No school would be allowed to coerce students to buy books from one vendor. Instead, the list of books would have to be put up on a board at the school, along with a list of vendors.
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