Education News

Delhi Controls regimen for international schools Twenty-first century India’s economic liberalisation and deregulation experiment is now over 15 years old. But officials of the Union HRD (human resource develop-ment) ministry seem unaware of this revolutionary development. They continue to tighten the already tight regime of licences, permits, rules, regulations and quotas on institutions of education. Now hard on the heels of the ministry having carved out an additional 27 percent quota for OBCs (other backward classes/castes), over and above the 22.5 percent quota reserved for SCs and STs (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes), in all central government sponsored institutions of higher education (including the seven IITs and six IIMs), comes another decree to regulate 5-star ‘international’ schools springing up across the country. A high-powered committee of the HRD ministry has reportedly formulated a stringent set of guidelines for international schools, particularly those affiliated with foreign examination boards, to bring them to heel. Henceforth, all schools which offer the syllabuses of the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO), Geneva or CIE (Cambridge International Examinations) UK, or of any other offshore examination board, will have to comply with the HRD ministry’s freshly-minted guidelines drawn up by an eight-member committee headed by erstwhile education secretary P.R. Dasgupta. However, faith-affiliated or missionary schools are exempt. According to the new guidelines, all future international schools as well as the 50 already operational in India (36 following the IB curriculum and 14 affiliated with CIE), will have “…to seek governmental clearance before setting up operations in India, show respect to the Indian Constitution, adapt their curriculums to the Indian context, restrict the entry of foreign teachers and, most importantly, make their source of funding public”. To implement the ministry’s guidelines, a six-member standing committee has been constituted to scrutinise proposals of parties interested in establishing international schools in India. The committee is obliged to give the green (or red) light within six months of application. The standing committee will also supervise affiliations, syllabuses, curriculum, fee structure, faculty details and publish lists of approved schools periodically. Interestingly, according to the new rules, international schools will “…not have the same foreign principal/faculty for more than three consecutive years”. Nor can these schools import more than 20 percent of the faculty from abroad. Also, in a bid to ensure pay parity — a major grievance of locally recruited faculty — all teachers in these schools will have equity in pay scales according to rank and designation. Surprisingly, Prabhat Jain, chairman and promoter of the state-of-the-art, IB affiliated Pathways World School, Delhi (estb. 2003) accepts regulation as a mixed blessing. “The descriptive ‘international’ is much-abused. Any school with reasonably decent infrastructure terms itself ‘international’. Government supervision will definitely make school promoters more careful. However, on the negative side, this system will intensify licence-permit-quota raj in education,” says Jain. There’s the rub. Quite obviously educrats at the Centre and the state levels were less than content that they had no control over schools set up with budgets ranging from Rs.30-150 crore and charging unprecedented…