The Jammu Kashmir Administration is reportedly all set to issue the draft rules to strengthen its Fee Fixation and Regulation Committee (FFRC) and the same may be notified soon in coming days. The rules are urgently needed to deal and regulate effectively the Fee Fixation for the Private Schools and other private institutions who have been otherwise indulging into huge exploitation of parents of pupils and in other malpractices in the name of imparting pre-primary to Higher Secondary School education.
To contain and regulate the frequent, arbitrary and whimsical hike in school fees and other charges under difference nomenclatures and to check the growing trends of commercialization in the education system by some private Schools, the work of FFRC is highly appreciable in the last couple of years though more has to be done to reign in the private school owners mafia.
After the revival of the Committee for Fixation of Fee Structure of the Private Education Institutions in 2015, a lot of hard work and efforts have been put by the committee to clear the mess created by most of these Private Schools of brazen loot by fleecing the parents of the pupils in Private Schools.
A long struggle of parents’ bodies at national and state levels and with judicial interventions, such a regulatory body became possible that has provided some semblance of relief to the hard-pressed parents to carry on the schooling of their wards. Parents and a good number of School Managements have publicly appreciated the working of Fee Fixation and Regulation Committee that has successfully regulated the fee of hundreds of Private schools in a short span of time that has helped to minimize the major tussle on fee structure between parents and School Managements.
While reasonably sufficient powers are provided in the amended J&K School Education Act, a set of comprehensive rules will provide more teeth to the FFRC to achieve the ends of the statues. The functioning of the committee will become more vibrant. These rules were adopted by the committee after a resolution was passed in a meeting held in the month of March 2021, chaired by Chairperson FFRC Justice Muzaffar Hussain Attar and attended by Principal Secretary Govt. Education Deptt., Secretary JK BoSE, and Director School Education Jammu. The draft rules are now to be notified by the government and all stakeholders are anxiously waiting for the Government approval. Thus approval of the rules and their notification needs some promptness.
By virtue of the statutory powers the FFRC has passed some historical orders regarding banning of admission fee, No hike in annual fee and tuition fee for the year 2021 and also revoking of a controversial order issued by previous committee vide order No 01, 2019, dated 28 January 2019. Government came under sharp criticism when people hit roads to protest in the year 2019, for that controversial order. That order allowed all the schools to avail a universal hike of 6 percent yearly while the schools having fee less than 1000 and annual fee less than 6000 were given liberty to fix fee on their own with some ambiguous conditions. “The order was misused and so many cases surfaced before the committee wherein schools have hiked the fee exorbitantly and against the fixed norms,” sources said. The government is defending a number of petitions in different courts of Jammu and Srinagar and one in the Supreme Court also wherein some school managements have challenged the committee orders. Most of the orders challenged have been passed in light of the draft rules particularly against the schools indulging in profiteering and charging illegal fees.
The committee has fixed a reasonable fee for these schools after considering all the factors governing the subject in the light of draft rules. The legal counsel representing the government has filed a similar response in the courts and therefore any delay in notifying the rules will make the position of government very awkward and also affect the committee that has been working tirelessly to safeguard the interest of all stakeholders.
This is also in place to mention here that by virtue of these rules the FFRC Chairperson has been given the authority to regulate fee structure of schools having fee structure upto Rs 1500 per month and Annual Fee upto Rs 6000 and it is for this reason that Fee structure of more than 90% schools in winter zone and substantial number of schools of summer zone have been regulated. According to the rules the schools whose fee is higher than the above needs to be fixed by the committee for which the presence of Principal Secretary to Government School Education Department and Secretary J&K Board of School Education, besides Director School Education is mandatory, as all of them are the members of the committee.
