Education minister PK Shahi. Telegraph picture

Patna, Feb. 24: Education minister P.K. Shahi today admitted that the state did not have a mechanism in place to regulate high donation fees charged by private schools during admission to nursery classes.

Answering a short-notice question by Kedar Nath Pandey in the Legislative Council, Shahi acknowledged that it was a “matter of concern” that schools were charging fee arbitrarily during admission to nursery classes.

Pandey wanted to know if the government was taking cognisance of the fact that most schools were demanding Rs 8,000-Rs 30,000 at the time children step into schools.

Responding to this, Shahi said nowhere in the country, the government could directly regulate the fee charged by private schools and so it was difficult for the state government to interfere in the matter as it’s policy was to encourage private schools.

“We will, however, try and see what we can do within the statutory guidelines framed by Parliament and the state legislature. We will also have to see whether such a regulation does not conflict with the right to universal education as guaranteed by the Constitution. Our focus has been to ensure that private schools admit 25 per cent children from economically poor background under Right to Education (RTE) Act,” he added.

During the discussion on the same question, the minister added that as there are around 1.9 crore school-going children in the state, the government did not have necessary infrastructure and resources to provide primary and secondary-level educa-tion to such a large number of students.

“We, therefore, cannot crack the whip on private schools that will discourage their operation in our state,” Shahi said. Council chairman Tarakant Jha also urged Shahi to see “how could the government rein in the private schools”.

Shahi added that a survey was underway at present to see how many children in the state were enrolled in government schools, as lakhs of them were reported to be enrolled in both private and government schools to avail facilities offered by the state.

A senior member of the council, Kiran Ghai, said the state government should implement recommendations of the Naveen Kishore Sinha committee, which had suggested a host of measures for regulating the “arbitrary ways of private schools”.

In response to a starred question posed by MLC Narendra Prasad Singh, Shahi acknowledged that the state has still not been able to separate Intermediate classes from degree colleges as directed by Patna High Court.

“The national educational policy also recommends that higher secondary schools be upgraded to Intermediate-level schools. However, many schools still lack the requisite infrastructure and adeq-uate number of teach- ers to be able to start Intermediate-level studies. The process of upgrade is still on,” Shahi said.

The House also saw a heated debate on the issue of appointment of trade teachers in state-run engineer- ing and polytechnic institutions even as most of the questions discussed today focussed on education, science and technology.