Easy pickings

School fee increases

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Rich pickings

How much does a public school teacher in Nepal earn in a month? Around Rs 18,000 for a primary school teacher, which goes up to Rs 25,000 for someone teaching secondary school. Considering that the average annual inflation is as high as 10 percent, this is a pittance. It is thus disingenuous of PABSON and N-PABSON—the two umbrella bodies which together represent nearly all private schools in the country—to argue that private schools need to increase their fees by an astounding 38 percent in order to meet the government directive on comparable pay for private and public school teachers. As many as 700,000 students will be affected by fee increases starting mid-April. To stop such arbitrary fee-setting the Supreme Court had in 2012 directed private schools not to change their fee structures for the next three years, and if they had to, to obtain prior government approval. Yet PABSON and N-PABSON have repeatedly increased their fees in the last three years without government consent.

This year too, the private schools have decided to increase fees, in clear contravention of the Supreme Court verdict and a new set of directives on school fees prepared by the Department of Education in 2013. Dr Govinda KC, it is relevant to note here, has been on a fast-unto-death for the last ten days in his crusade against the 'medical mafia', his preferred term for those applying for license for new medical colleges whose only motive is profit-making. He is bang on when he says that vital sectors like health and education cannot be run like other profit-oriented sectors—not in a country where nearly half the population lacks basic health care and, increasingly, more and more struggle to meet the growing educational needs of their children. But there is a paradox here. These parents could easily afford cheaper public schools. But most choose to send their wards to private schools as they believe these schools represent the only hope for gainful employment of their children in the future. And private school operators have looked to cash in on this sense of desperation of low- and middle-income parents.

They must not be allowed to exploit these helpless parents. The PABSON and N-PABSON officials who are trying to impose unjustifiable fees must be punished, for violating court verdict and refusing to abide by government regulation. But that is unlikely. Most public school operators have close links with one or the other political party, mostly CPN-UML, and they are quite adept at pulling the right strings. This is why they get away with open loot. To break this depressing cycle, we must use the momentum built by Dr KC's hunger strike to initiate vital reforms in school education as well. One of the ways to resolve the issue would be through a mechanism with representation from both private schools and government for periodic review of school fees. But such a mechanism already exists: in the form of the Private Schools Fee Determination Committee under the Department of Education. The problem is that private schools have chosen to conveniently ignore any reasonable solution proposed by the bipartisan committee. The private school operators, it seems, are determined to have their way—rules, regulations and civic duty be damned.