A centralised system for nursery admission of poor students in private schools is in the pipeline to check alleged wrongdoings by school managements and harassment of parents of students from the economically weak sections.
Sources in the Delhi government said Education Minister Manish Sisodia is finalising a scheme under which private schools will have no role in the lottery held to fill the 25 percent of all seats reserved for poor students.
In place of a lottery at individual institutions, the draw of lots will be held by the government and the EWS students would be asked apply on prescribed online forms for it. After the centralised draw of lots, the government would allot institutions to the applicants, said sources.
“The government will do the screening and conduct the draw. A list of successful candidates will then be sent to private school managements for admitting them,” said a functionary in the education department.
Parents of each EWS student will be asked to give their top 10 most preferred private schools near their homes for their children’s admission.
“The parents will have options of either applying online on the government portal or fill physical forms and deposit them with individual schools,” said an official.
The applications of poor students who apply in schools will be uploaded to the centralised server by the respective institutions. “The process will be more like the centralised admission process followed by the Delhi University for undergraduate courses,” he said.
A strategy is being devised to check use of forged income certificates in the admission process. “In one case of rigging the EWS admission lottery, it was found that a school management kept the slips of preferred students in a freezer for hours before the draw. These slips turned cold and were taken out of freezer minutes before the draw and mixed with other slips. It was easy to pick only the cold slips in the draw without anyone being able to detect the fraud,” said an education department functionary.
An official said the centralised admission process will also prevent some unscrupulous school managements from admitting well-off students under the EWS quota, using forged income certificates.
“In the case of such students, the school records are changed in higher classes and there are no traces left to indicate that they got admission under the poor student quota,” he said.
The Delhi government has also received several complaints from parents that school managements tend to victimise their wards in case they raise their voice for their rights.