GB Nagar parents of dream schools pledge not to pay hiked fee, say rollback not enough

NOIDA: About two hundred parents protested against the three-fold fee hike in the four government inter colleges of Gautam Budh Nagar outside the Panchsheel Balak Inter College on Tuesday demanding that the schools be taken over by the state government under the Deen Dayal Upadhyay model school scheme under which 166 new schools have been started by the UP government.
The parents including widows, disabled and private company employees, had gathered outside the inter-college as early as 8:30 am.

After protesting for almost two hours outside the school's gate, many of them went inside the cabin of Principal Neeraj Tandon and ran a live Facebook stream from inside saying that they will not pay the hiked fees for the new session beginning in April and will meet CM Yogi Adityanath to protest against the fee hike in case the same is not rolled back.

The schools which were built in 2010 ran for free for the first two years and fee started charging fees in 2012. Since then, there has been a minor hike in fee only once.

In 2018, as the new and old students started taking admissions, the schools revealed the new structure to them. While earlier, there used to be three categories of classes for which fee structure was same -class I to V, class VI to VIII and class IX to XII, five categories have been created now- class I to II, class III to V, VI to VIII, IX and X and class XI to XII.

All the classes falling in one category will have the same fee structure. While the two-month fee for a class VI child in SC/ST category till 2017 was Rs. 5775 including three fee heads- pupil fee, tution fee and transport charges, the fee has been increased to Rs. 16950 in 2018- almost three times the previous year.

The new heads which have been introduced include admission fee, caution money (refundable), maintenance charge, co-curricular activity fee, examination fee and e-learning and lab fee.

“These schools were constructed only to help those coming from economically poor backgrounds or children of farmers whose land was acquired. Till seven years, the schools were running as they are. However, now the Noida-Greater Noida Education Society has suddenly raised the fee to three fold. How can this be justified?,” said Rajesh Pandit, head of an informal association of parents of students of the four inter colleges- Mahamaya Balika Inter College, Panchasheel Balak Inter College, Gautam Buddha Balak Inter College and Savitribai Phule Balika Inter College.

They alleged that a minor percentage was reduced from the fees after a meeting with the Meerut mandal commissioner Prabhat Kumar who is also the chairman of the Noida-Greater Noida education society, which manages the four schools which are funded by Noida and Greater Noida authorities.

Meerut mandal commissioner Prabhat Kumar however told TOI that they will look into the demands of the parents and evaluate the decrease in the percentage of the fee hike. “The fee has not been hiked for a long time. We are running a deficit and a hike is essential to make the schools self-dependent,” he said.