Explained: The Delhi Governments Bill to Regulate Private School Fees Is No Victory for Parents

The Wire

6 days ago

The Delhi Private Schools Fee Regulation Bill 2025 makes dissent impossible and de-risks the business of education.
The Delhi government has just passed a new law to regulate private school fees . It is being called "historic" and a victory for parents.
But reading the fine print of the law shows that one cannot accept it for what it says, but for what it is designed to do.
This Bill is not a shield for parents but for school managements. It is a web of rules and omissions designed not to deliver justice, but to manage and exhaust dissent. The background
Private education in Delhi isn't a simple service. It is a market defined by a power imbalance. Getting your child into a decent school is an ordeal. Once they are in, you are a captive consumer for the next 14 years.
The schools themselves, many built on public land and legally mandated to be non-profits, operate as sophisticated businesses. The "non-profit" tag has become legal fiction, a convenient cloak for an industry whose real goal is profit generation.
For years, the battle over fees has been fought in courtrooms and on the streets. The previous Aad Aadmi Party government's strategy was aggressive: forcing schools to open their books for a financial audit. It correctly identified the core of the issue: you cannot regulate fees without scrutinising accounts. But the effort was bogged down in politics and litigation.
This new Bill by the BJP is the response. The question is: does it learn from that history and empower the parent or does it simply create a more elegant system to keep them in their place? The labyrinth
The Bill creates a three-tiered system . On paper, it looks orderly. In practice, it is an architecture of disenfranchisement. Let's walk through it.
First, the school level committee.
The composition of the school-level committee is laid out in Section 4. The chairperson is from the school management. The secretary is the principal. On one side of the table, you have them, plus three teachers – their own employees, in a position of structural dependency. On the other side? Five parents, selected by a "draw of lots."
The power in that room is deliberately rigged. The management are insiders with the data and authority. The parents are temporary outsiders, atomised by that "draw of lots" – a mechanism that ensures any skilled, troublesome parent can be conveniently removed the next year by the luck of the draw.
Then, Section 5(4) states that any decision on fees requires "unanimous agreement." This gives the management the power to block any parent-led initiative. Although it can also technically allow parents to block a management-led initiative as well, power will skew towards the management for more reasons than one (more on this in the subsequent paragraphs). It's a committee designed not for consensus, but for guaranteed deadlock.
Second, grievance.
The management uses its veto. You, the parent, are outraged and want to appeal. Here, the Bill erects its most formidable barrier. Section 2(2) states that an individual parent has no right to appeal. None.
To appeal, you must form an "aggrieved parents group" comprising "not less than 15%" of the school's total parent body. In a school of 3,000 students, this would mean amassing 450 parents. This is monumental barrier to justice, designed to be almost insurmountable. It transforms the right to justice from an individual right into a privilege reserved only for those with the extraordinary resources to build a mass movement.
Third, the bar on justice.
Section 17 of the Bill explicitly bars the jurisdiction of civil courts. This removes an independent, final avenue for redress for every parent limited by the "15%" stipulation. Remember, the foundational committee is controlled by the very management they seek to challenge. The ghosts in the machine
What a law does not say is often more important than what it does. This Bill is defined by its strategic silences.
Consider this central fact: An audit, the single most important word for financial transparency is completely absent from this entire Bill.
Instead of demanding a forensic financial audit, Section 8 offers a vague 18 "factors" for setting fees, like "location," "infrastructure," and "education standard." These words are meaningless without an audit. A school can claim it needs a fee hike for "infrastructure" without ever having to prove it could not be paid for from its existing surplus funds.
It shifts the debate from the verifiable mathematics of an audit to an endless argument. It replaces "Show us your books" with "Trust our story."
Tucked away in Section 19 is another ghost. The Bill gives the government the power to frame "Rules" to implement the Act at a later date. This is a classic statecraft technique. Pass a palatable Bill in public, but control its real teeth and claws in the fine print of the Rules, which are drafted later, away from legislative scrutiny. The most critical procedures are all yet to be decided. The poison pills
Finally, the Bill is seeded with legal traps that ensure the powerful stay powerful.
First, the amnesty clause.
A proviso in Section 5(1) is a masterpiece of quiet deception. It says the fee being charged as of April 1, 2025, is the "deemed" legal starting point. The implication is staggering. It effectively launders any illegal or unapproved fee hikes that schools pushed through before the law came into effect. It takes a potentially illegal figure and sanctifies it, rewarding the lawbreakers by making their illicit gains the legitimate baseline for all future calculations.
Second, the spectacle of the circular penalty.
Section 12 boasts of hefty fines for violations. It is meant to look tough, but is an illusion. A "non-profit" school has one main source of revenue: your fees. A fine imposed for exploiting parents will, by financial necessity, be recouped from the very same parents through future fees. The punishment is circular. The Bill studiously avoids the only real deterrents: personal financial liability for management officials, or a credible process for the government to take over the school.
The private school fee regulation bill thus paves the way for a law that rigs the debate in a committee room, makes appealing a near-impossible task, removes the power of judicial review, strips out the essential tool of a financial audit, and forgives past illegalities and creates a fake punishment.
This Bill does not help parents but de-risks the business of education. It provides stability and predictability not for the parent, but for the school industry, making it a safer, more attractive investment. This article went live on August twelfth, two thousand twenty five, at thirty-three minutes past four in the afternoon.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.