Wrong issue

Murli Manohar Joshi is in good company, that of the country's courts. While his demand to get the IIMs to slash their fees was upheld by the Supreme Court (with a caveat on the IIMs' autonomy being preserved), the court has now empowered the Delhi government to regulate private school fees. It is only a matter of time now before other states ape Delhi.

In order to justify their fees, all schools will have to file their accounts to the director of education, giving details of revenue and expenditure.

In other words, if the autonomy of the IIMs and the IITs was under threat, this has now been extended to schools as well "" with government babus now free to determine what fee structures and even costs should be. One thing will now lead to another "" in one of the IIMs, for instance, a government nominee asked why a professor travelled by air to a meeting!

What is worse, the directive that schools cannot transfer funds to the parent society running the school will ensure that there is no expansion of these private schools.

Today, the expansion of leading school chains, like the Delhi Public School, is financed from the surpluses made by the older branches. While the logic of the order was presumably to ensure that schools do not siphon profits (schools are anyway run as not-for-profit entities under the law), the effect is sure to be perverse.

The court's directive on schools that were given concessionally priced land in return for reserving seats for the economically backward is fair "" if the schools agreed to reserve seats for the poor, they need to keep their commitments.

The equally relevant point, however, is that if schools are to be run on a not-for-profit basis, then they should be getting concessional land as a matter of course.

And if they have to provide free education to 20-25 per cent of their students, then they will need to raise fees further for the paying students. The court presumably is aware of the way books have to be balanced.

The real issue, which neither the government nor the courts have addressed, is entirely different. The country's poor students, who cannot afford to pay the high fees at privately run schools, are not getting a good education in government schools.

Indeed, such is the level of unionisation of teachers, the cost of educating a child in a government school is actually higher than educating the child in a privately run school, and in the majority of cases, there is virtually no comparison when it comes to the quality of education provided.

In other words, the government should focus on getting private managements into its schools instead of trying to increase control over the private schools that have been doing a good job, often with little help from the government.

Indeed, even the poor are increasingly sending their children to private schools "" an Indicus Analytics study in Hyderabad found that a fourth of all children in private schools in urban areas are from the poorest 40 per cent of the population.

The court's judgement does nothing to address this issue, but makes things worse in the section of the education sector that is actually working.