There’s growing disaffection within the communities of promoters, principals, teachers and parents of primary-secondary schools affiliated with the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — India’s largest national school-leaving (classes X and XII) examinations board which has 18,006 affiliated schools with an estimated 30 million students countrywide. In recent months, a spate of circulars and directives has emanated from the board’s headquarters in Preet Vihar, New Delhi, which has generated confusion in affiliated schools attended by children of the country’s influential upwardly mobile middle class. They have aroused apprehension of severe erosion of institutional autonomy, especially within stakeholders of widely admired affiliated private unaided (financially independent) schools. Although CBSE, established in 1962 essentially for children of the country’s civil servants, includes the 1,113 Central government-promoted Kendriya Vidyalaya (KVs) day schools and 587 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs — free-of-charge class VI-XII boarding schools for meritorious rural students) as well as less prestigious government schools in Delhi state among its 18,006 affiliated primary-secondaries, over the past six decades, promoters of 13,657 private schools countrywide have signed up with CBSE rather than the rival Delhi-based Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE). Among them: Welham Boys, Welham Girls (Dehradun), the Lawrence schools in Sanawar and Lovedale (Ooty), Daly College, Indore and the 335 Delhi Public Schools (DPS) chain owned and franchised by the Delhi-based DPS Society (estb.1949). While government schools tend to quiescently accept CBSE’s often arbitrary and contradictory fiats and diktats, promoters and managements of private unaided schools which opted to affiliate with the professedly autonomous CBSE, which is under the jurisdictional purview of the Union ministry of human resource development, are becoming increasingly perturbed by several directives issued by the CBSE top brass in recent months. On December 20, 2016, the board readily endorsed a proposal of the Union HRD ministry to restore the mandatory status of the class X exam for all affiliated schools, revoking its own directive of 2009 when under the influence of Kapil Sibal, then Union HRD minister of the Congress-led UPA-II government, it decreed the board’s high school-leaving exam optional for class X students. The CBSE management’s pliant reversal of its earlier decision to make the class X exam compulsory in all affiliated schools, has reinforced popular sentiment that in reality, this professedly autonomous examination board is a willing handmaiden of any HRD ministry incumbent and the ruling party at the Centre. While there is a good argument for restoration of the compulsory class X exam — the substitute continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) system having failed due to inadequate teacher preparation — other recent firmans of the CBSE management have aroused widespread anger and indignation among private unaided schools affiliated with India’s largest national school education board. On December 21, the governing body of the board issued an affiliation bye-law circular changing the composition of the selection committee for recruiting heads of affiliated schools. Whereas formerly, the selection committee was an internal affair under Rule 25.2 (a) and comprised the president of the…
