Balurghat, July 15 :    Balurghat, July 15:  It's regional bias all right, but more in the nature of 'positive discrimination'. Flush with the success scripted by star students Paramita Mitra (first in this year's Higher Secondary examination) and Roumi Ghosh (17th), the authorities of Balurghat Girls' High School now feel that north Bengal's triumph over Calcutta and its suburbs - 'pampered' with good infrastructure - has been delayed till now largely because of the now-scrapped policy to send answer-scripts of 'their' students to examiners from south Bengal. Still backward in almost every other aspect - Balurghat is the only district headquarters in the state yet to have a railway track in its vicinity or a decent lodging place for visitors - the school's teachers now feel that north Bengal's students are finally 'getting justice' because Higher Secondary answer-scripts now do not usually travel outside the region. 'I don't know whether I should be saying this,' said the school's headmistress Shanti Majumdar-Bhattacharya, but still insisted that her 'gut feeling' - that the backward region's students suffered because their papers went to examiners in Calcutta and its suburbs - was, 'perhaps, correct'. 'This is a very real suspicion among a cross-section of teachers from this region,' she said, claiming to voice the unspoken grievance of her colleagues from every north Bengal school. 'Why should I suppress our genuine feelings?' she asked. Assistant headmistress Shikha Das agreed, but added that the school's 'dramatic improvement' in the very recent past was also because of the 'confidence' gained by sporadically earning plac-es on the merit list, especially in the Madhyamik examination. 'Many of our students did very well in the Madhyamik and it was only a matter of time before they (Paramita stood fourth in 2000 Madhyamik) replicated their success in a much tougher exam two years down the line,' Das said. Another factor, which teachers said 'could not be stressed enough', had a 'very positive' impact on the school's overall infrastructure development and, consequently, results. It has become one of the first government-sponsored schools in the state, and definitely the first in north Bengal, to read the 'privatisation' writing on the wall and plan its moves accordingly. In the process, it has built infrastructure comparable to Calcutta schools. 'We have realised that the government, burdened with increasing pressure on its financial resources, may soon ask educational institutions to become self-financing,' headmistress Majumdar-Bhattacharya said. So at a time when 'building fund' is a dirty word even in Calcutta and 'extra computer charges' raise hackles of even the affluent among parents, the school - led, surprisingly, by district secretary of the CPM-affiliated All-Bengal Teachers' Association Dhirendranath Kundu (the school's managing committee secretary) - has gone a step ahead of the government with its own brand of 'education reforms'. 'It was Kundu who first warned us that our school would go the way of neighbouring schools - the nearby Khadimpur Girls' High School, for instance, does not have an instructor to teach computers which now gather dust - if we did not change our mind-set,' the headmistress said. After a decision pushed through by the managing committee, the school charges new entrants an annual 'building fund' of Rs 100, Rs 25 as 'computer charges' and Rs 20 as 'extra exam fees' to supplement the government-sanctioned Rs 12 for each student. 'If we can give our girls good laboratories and computer lessons, a library that has a steady supply of new books and classrooms which do not have leaking roofs, it's because of our pragmatism,' the headmistress said. 'It's because we do not fight ideological battles in the classroom,' she added, insisting that the self-financing policy - she chose to call it 'machher tele machh bhaja' - was the main reason the school could give its girls the infrastructure to fight the richer and better-known schools of south Bengal.