Notice issued over nursery admission guidelines

NEW DELHI - The Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR) Friday issued notice to the Delhi government over the nursery admission guidelines, saying they were violative of the provisions of the Right to Education (RTE) Act.

“The commission issued notice to the principal secretary, education, Delhi government to re-examine the order on top priority since prima-facie the said order is violative of the RTE Act,” a DCPCR statement said. The guidelines were issued Thursday.

“The guidelines issued by the human resource development ministry and the Delhi government are in conformity with the RTE Act in so far as they apply random selection criteria to 25 percent seats for children from economically weaker section.

“However, the order of the Directorate of Education (DoE) clearly violates the provisions of RTE wherein it deals with remaining 75 per cent seats in respect of un-aided and specified category schools,” a DCPCR official said.

“As regard to liberty given to schools to formulate their admission policy, the commission is of the view that this liberty would be tantamount to the government not having any control over the admission policies of the schools as there is no mention of the date by which they are supposed to submit the policy to the DoE,” the official added.

The nursery admission guidelines state that schools will be free to formulate their policy for admission for 75 percent of the seats but it should include criteria for categorisation of the applicants.

“The schools will be free to base their criteria like sibling, alumni, single parent, transfer case or neighbourhood.

“They will be asked to formulate their plan and submit it to the education department. The schools should consider that categorisation should be rational, reasonable and just,” Delhi Education Minister Arvinder Singh Lovely told reporters Thursday.

The DCPCR official said: “The categorisation of the applicants is nothing but introduction of the so called point system. Having dealt with a large number of cases of denial of admissions to the children, the commission has found that the point system is highly discriminatory, both prior and subsequent to the enforcement of RTE Act.”

The notice said: “Multiple criteria have been introduced for school admissions which would create preferences for certain types of categories of children over other category of children which would be clear violation of provisions of RTE Act”.

The commission has asked for a report on the same by Dec 27.