todaybhaskar.com
faridabad| The schools are no longer ‘gurukuls’ in forests. These do not have estates or properties on which these can depend. These have to find resources to run the organization. The principals, teachers and ancillary staff, who work, wish to have a good standard of living so they demand good salaries. The govt. raises the stakes by regularly setting up pay commissions and pressurizes the schools to follow suit. It is easy for the government to give increments because it can levy taxes at will- education cess, swatch Bharat cess. It has a regular source of income and has the power of law to increment its resources. On the other hand, the schools have to think a lot and have to see the paying power of its parents. The schools have to feel their pulse and move forward. Some of you will rightly disagree that such schools exist, but believe you me there are some that do still breathe. Educationists, teachers and parents in unison run these. My plea to intelligentsia is not to show give the dog a bad name and hang it attitude.
The education authorities burden the schools by their unproductive rules and regulations. At present there will hardly be any private school that is not in the court squandering children’s’ money to ward off ill effects of babudom that operates these laws. The schools used to be exempt from the house tax, but now they are paying more even than the industry. The power, water charges are also levied at commercial rates by the same governments that certify the schools as charitable. Don’t you find it confusing?
The govt. should only set a mark of one universal minimum wage, evolve a national curriculum of education, and let the entrepreneurs work. We in India are trying to mimic the West without realizing that they are welfare states in reality and as such have a very different climate. In those countries the education and medical care is free and the pure water and power supply flows uninterrupted.
Our tendency to imitate the West in forcing free education on schools will not promote good education but choke it.
Kuldip Singh Founder Principal of Homerton Grammar School
