More than 300 private schools in TN found guilty of collecting excess fees

The team is also supposed to visit private schools and check their records manually to look for violations while collecting fees from parents.

The state government has enacted ‘The Tamil Nadu Schools (Regulation of Collection of Fees) Act, to prevent commercialisation of education and to control profiteering and collection of capitation fee.

A committee headed by retired High Court judge has been constituted for the purpose of fixing fees for nearly 10,200 schools. A senior official from the School Education Department said that the committee has so far determined fees for 7,805 schools from for academic years 2019-21.

The official added determining fees for the rest of the schools was under way and that those schools were instructed to collect the fees according to the last arrangement until new are issued.

“Fixation orders were sent to schools well before the academic year so that the management of the institutions can collect fees as per the norms,” the official said. He added, “But, there have been complaints from parents and parent-teacher associations that certain schools collect fees more than the stipulated amount.”

According to him, since June, the authorities have received more than 1,500 complaints from parents alone. “After scrutinising the complaints, we found that at least 300 schools have violated the rules and collected extra fees,” the officer said. He added that certain schools were also issuing receipts only for the stipulated fee amount and were collecting the rest without issuing receipts. “To look into such matters, the probe team will visit these schools and verify the complaints. If any school management found guilty, action will be taken against them and the school will be asked to refund the extra money to the parents immediately.” the official said.

Last year, a school was ordered to return Rs 63,86,290 to students, which was collected in excess of the fee fixed by the committee, he added.