New Delhi: Members of Parliament will no longer be able to recommend admissions to Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) schools under a special quota so-long allotted to them, fresh guidelines issued by the schools’ governing body clarified Tuesday. The body had last year scrapped a similar quota once allotted to the education minister.
As reported by ThePrint earlier, the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), the governing body for KV schools, has been reviewing its decision to put admissions under the special quota for admissions on hold. In a notice released Tuesday, the KVS decided to scrap the quotas allotted to MPs, from a list of 16 special admission quotas. It also upheld its earlier decision to scrap the quota once allotted to the education minister, which it had already removed last year.
The body has retained most of the other special provisions, which include admission for children of armed forces personnel, KVS employees, bravery award winners, and children who have won national accolades, among other categories. It, however, removed the quota for wards of education ministry employees.
According to KVS officials, the decision to scrap the two special quotas for MPs and the education minister was taken because schools were getting overwhelmed with the number of admissions under both these quotas.
Under the special provision, each MP was allowed to recommend names of 10 students from their constituencies. Sources said, however, that the numbers were sometimes exceeding the limit, putting additional burden on the school’s infrastructure.
There was no limit to how many students the education minister could recommend for admission, the number depended on the minister’s discretion.
‘Forced to run school in two shifts’
“We were being forced to run schools in two shifts and our teacher-student ratio was also getting disturbed because of the additional number of students, schools were getting. This was the reason we had to re-think the special quota,” said a KVS official.
The official also said that the number of students who are not children of government employees was far exceeding the number of children who belonged to such families, because of which the whole purpose of KV schools was getting diluted.
“KV schools were established with the purpose of providing quality education to the wards of central government employees and armed forces personnel, because they keep getting transferred very often and KV schools ensured that their children received good education wherever they went. However, off late that purpose seems to have been lost because of the special quota. Currently, only about 23 per cent of the students are from families that are in government jobs,” the official added.
From 60 per cent students from families of central government employees in 2011-12, the number dropped to 47 per cent in 2017-18. The latest figures of 23 per cent wards of government employees is the lowest such number in recent years, officials informed.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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