Private centres of learning in India should keep an eye on Mr Murli Manohar Joshi and his ministry, just as he seems to spend more and more time keeping an eye on them. This is particularly true if they have proved themselves as centres of excellence, and have been commercially successful. The long saga of Mr Joshi’s personal interest, so to speak, in the Indian institutes of management is coming to a mixed end. Some of the IIMs have held their ground over Mr Joshi’s diktat regarding fees, although some have relented. For some institutions autonomy is proving to be a much more beleaguered concept than one would have expected from a shining economy. It would not be too paranoid, therefore, to regard with some wariness Mr Joshi’s latest interest in Delhi’s public schools. Just when some of the best schools in the capital have decided to raise their fees, he has asked the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India to prepare a blueprint for auditing their accounts. This is ostensibly to prevent the schools from misrepresenting information on their earnings and expenditure.

Mr Joshi’s ministry of human resource development will instruct the Central Board of Secondary Education and other funding bodies to make this blueprint mandatory, and to ensure that schools maintain individual accounts for funds received and spent for specific purposes. This is to increase the levels of transparency and accountability in these schools. Such standardized and monitored book-keeping will also prevent trustees from offloading their personal expenses on to school accounts. But such vigilance immediately paves the way for at least two external authorities — Mr Joshi’s ministry and the CBSE — to directly intervene in the schools’ administration in the name of keeping an eye on the accounts. In a sense, to do this with private schools seems even more control-freakish than meddling with the IIMs. The management institutions do receive funds from the government, which had a significant role to play in founding them in the first place — not that this justifies the government’s not being able to let them go when they have learnt to manage for themselves. But these schools are entirely private institutions, and have been autonomous bodies right from the beginning. To bring them, however indirectly, under the Centre’s jurisdiction in the name of cleaning up their financial administration smacks of an officiousness that, given Mr Joshi’s recent achievements, should be countered with a robust dose of independent-mindedness by the schools.