Delhi: Court confounded confusion

CHAOS OVER NURSERY admissions in Delhi is becoming more confounded with parents resorting to fraud and trickery to get children admitted into the nurseries of the city’s estimated 6,600 composite schools, which ensures a smooth passage in school education for the next 12 years. After an investigation by the state government’s education ministry unearthed that, “out of 1,520 applications in which (points for) inter-state transfer had been claimed, 844 applications were not genuine,” on February 27 the Delhi high court passed an order scrapping the five points weighting given to the inter-state transfer category. Under the 100-point guideline issued by Delhi’s lieutenant governor, children who live in the neighbourhood (within 8 km) are awarded 70 points, 20 more points if they have a sibling already studying in the school of choice, and five points if a parent is an alum of the school. But given the huge number of applications with identical points surpassing the small number of available nursery seats, each school is obliged to conduct a draw of lots (aka lottery) to finalise admission eligibility. Yet following the abolition of the inter-state transfer criterion, on March 6 the Delhi high court ordered fresh draw of lots. Unsurprisingly these court orders didn’t go down well with parents who have already run the gauntlet and whose children have been admitted under the first draw of lots.  Therefore they appealed the March 6 order mandating another lottery. Responding to the appeal, on March 12, a division bench of acting Chief Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Siddharth Mridul stayed the March 6 order postponing hearing to April 2. The genesis of problems concerning nursery admissions can be traced to a Delhi high court division bench order dated September 4, 2006 in Rakesh Goel vs. Montford School (LPA 196/2004), constituting an expert committee headed by Ashok Ganguly (then chairman of CBSE) to evolve a transparent system to govern nursery admissions and eliminate child interviews. In 2007, the Ganguly committee presented an admissions process based on a formula giving graded weighting to neighbourhood, alumni, sibling, single parent, inter-state transfer and management quota children. Despite this, nursery admissions have become a battleground for disputes between the Delhi state government and private unaided schools with parents rushing to court for alleged infractions of the Ganguly committee’s admission criteria, as also for allegedly charging exorbitant tuition fees. Curiously, the Delhi high court has repeatedly admitted such writs despite the apex court judgement in T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case (2002 8 SCC 481) clearly stating that “in the case of unaided private schools, maximum autonomy has to be with the management with regard to administration, including the rights of appointment, disciplinary powers, admission of students and the fees to be charged”. “Nowhere else in the country is the state government micro-managing admissions into private unaided schools. The T.M.A. Pai judgement clearly states that admissions into private schools can’t be regulated by government. Instead of appreciating the role they play in providing quality education to students, the Delhi state government…