Notwithstanding a detailed cover story in EducationWorld (February 2017) in which several principals of the country’s top-ranked schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) roundly criticised the pan-India school-leaving examination board for excessive interference, this Delhi-based nominally autonomous exam board, which is under the supervisory jurisdiction of the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry, hasn’t mended its ways. On April 19, the board issued a circular to its 18,778 — including 13,657 private unaided (financially independent) — affiliated schools countrywide to refrain from advising parents to buy books, uniforms, shoes, bags etc from selected vendors and “use only the textbooks issued by the Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research and Training,” (NCERT, an autonomous body also under the supervisory jurisdiction of the HRD ministry). Citing rule 19.1 (ii) of its bye-laws, it said “managements shall ensure that school is run as a community service and not as a business and that commercialisation does not take place in the school in any shape whatsoever… there is a nexus of profiteering. But our affiliations (sic) are clear that schools are a community service and not commercial entities. It is mandatory for schools to adhere to the provisions,” said the circular signed by Rakesh Kumar Chaturvedi, a former bureaucrat, appointed chairman of CBSE in July 2016. Last December, Chaturvedi issued a circular under Rule 25.2 (a) of the CBSE’s bye-laws changing the composition of the managing committees of CBSE affiliated private schools to effectively vest power to appoint principals in the Central government. This circular prompted the Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan (SUPSR) to revive a writ petition (No.6510 of 2013) in the Delhi high court challenging the ambit of CBSE power. According to the petition, CBSE is a mere school-leaving examinations board with no power to regulate or prescribe administrative and regulatory norms for affiliated schools. Even as this writ petition is pending adjudication, on April 20, CBSE issued a disaffiliation show-cause notice to Delhi Public School, Mathura Road for re-appointing well-qualified educationist Manohar Lal, who has more than three decades of teaching and administrative experience, as the school’s principal. According to the show-cause notice, the board’s affiliation bye-laws (amended in December last year), mandate a retirement age of 60 for principals of affiliated schools. “CBSE is merely an examinations board authorised to conduct examinations. Therefore all its bye-laws relating to tuition fees, textbooks, uniforms, composition of managing and selection committees are illegal and ultra vires,” says Damodar Goyal, founder-president of SUPSR (estb.1997). Nor is SUPSR the only representative organisation of private schools fed up with the interference and command-and-control circulars of overbearing bureaucrats in CBSE and the Union HRD ministry. The Delhi-based National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA, estb.2011), which represents over 36,400 budget private schools across the country, is also set to go to court against a CBSE circular dated April 12 which threatens to impose a penalty of Rs.50,000 on schools that don’t make financial disclosures under the board’s bye-laws. “The board is continually deviating…
