Bikash Bhavan: The Bengal government will be convening a meeting of the self-regulatory commission for private schools to finalise a formula to fix tuition and other fees, education minister Partha Chatterjee said on Tuesday.

The last word on this will, of course, be chief minister Mamata Banerjee's, he clarified.

"A meeting will be held very soon to discuss the suggested fee structure for private schools. But the final decision on this will be taken only after we take it up with the chief minister and she approves of the proposed formula," Chatterjee told Metro.

The decision regarding the year of implementing the suggested fee structure will depend on the chief minister's consent to the proposal.

A sub-committee of the self-regulatory commission set up impromptu by Mamata last year has completed the process of collecting the relevant data from private schools, an official of the school education department said.

Mamata had set up the commission during a meeting with representatives of private schools at the Town Hall on May 30 last year. She had said that the objective of having such a commission was to monitor the fee structure of private schools, ensure that they don't seek donations against admission, keep the annual fee hike reasonable and maintain a system to examine the profits and expenditure of the schools.

The exercise is also meant to provide an opportunity for guardians and students to air their grievances.

The sub-committee has already drafted a formula using the collated data from schools and submitted it to the self-regulatory commission, the education department official said.

The data pertains to the tuition fee and other charges in each school, the kind of facilities provided, the number of students, faculty strength, educational qualifications of teachers, their pay scales and the number of years each institute has been in existence.

Schools have been split into categories, depending on their infrastructure and other facilities. Each category will be able to charge a particular amount as tuition fee, commensurate with what the students get in return.

"Each school will be required to volunteer to which category it belongs and fix the tuition fee and other charges accordingly. We (the government) will only provide the formula. This is why the commission is defined as a self-regulatory one," the official said.

According to him, a particular weightage will be assigned to the age of an institution and another to maintenance costs. If the expenses are on the higher side, so will be the tuition fee that students need to pay. A school with a low teacher-student ratio will have to prune the fee based on the weightage for that criterion.

A section of schools in Calcutta sees this as an attempt by the government to interfere in their administration, but there are some who treat this as "inevitable".

The official suggested that the older institutions will get some leeway.

"Bengal has schools that are more than a century old. The maintenance and renovation costs of these institutions can be higher than the newer ones. Weightage will also be assigned to academic excellence."