Nursery Admissions 2011 in Delhi as per RTE Guidelines

Published 13 years ago
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Nursery Admissions 2011

If you are planning to get your child admitted in nursery this year but have neither contacts in high places nor enough money for ‘capitation fees’, your kid will vie for one of just 45% of the total number of seats. Here too the criteria for selection will vary from school to school. Chances of getting in through a lottery are slim, with just 15% of total seats earmarked for ‘random selection’.

In the name of the RTE Act, Delhi government on Wednesday unveiled nursery admission guidelines that all but give a free hand to schools. Apart from the 25% quota for economically weaker sections, as required in the RTE Act, and a minimum 15% (20% of non-EWS seats) kept for random selection methods like lottery, admission norms for the rest of the seats will depend on individual schools.

Up to 15% seats (again, 20% of 75%) can be filled at the discretion of school managements. For the rest, schools will decide the parameters and their respective weightage. Schools to inform govt about their guidelines

For the 45% 'unreserved' seats for nursery admissions in city schools, the only restriction is that the parents' income or education cannot be a criterion.

As education minister Arvinder Singh clarified, this is not a return to the points system because whether the weightage will be in terms of points or some other unit - like stars, he said - has been left to individual schools. All they need to do after fixing their norms is inform the education department and publicize them through advertisements etc. They do not need DoE's approval to go ahead and start admissions. The department will get back only if there have any queries.

Admissions will start from January 1, 2011. While the process will more or less be over by March 31, admissions can officially continue till July 31.

The city government had fretted over the use of the word random in RTE and decided that if that is how selection is to be done, the point system to which schools had been seriously opposed to from its inception, would have to be junked. In essence though what they have done is to return to a system which draws its guiding principle from the point system but gives schools a lot of elbow room to pick and choose students and devise their own policy - the way they used to before the Ganguly committee recommendations.

Asked if the government was in essence capitulating to the school lobby, Singh said: ''I agree that schools were not happy with the point system initially but gradually they did come around to it. It was we who went to court and submitted an affidavit that the Ganguly committee recommendations cannot be followed in toto. In that this is not exactly a new move. We could have done a lottery but that would have inconvenienced parents. Watertight parameters may not work because if there is a school in Kirti Nagar Industrial Area, what would that school do with the neighbourhood criteria?''

He cited the HRD ministry clarification the government has received, which says: ''The guideline does not specify any category nor does it lay down any cap on any category identified by a school. Schools are free to identify any category based on policy/principles that are fair, just and reasonable within the ambit of the RTE Act and the guidelines referred to above and placed in public domain for implementing the admissions in schools.''

This meant, at least in theory, it was possible for schools to say the entire 75% general category seats would go into the management quota. Singh said, ''We will ensure that this does not happen. We are informally looking at a cap of 20% even though the HRD letter says there is no cap on any category.''

Similarly, he said, the random selection seats - meant for children like the first-born son of parents who do not qualify under criteria like sibling, alumnus, girl-child etc - would be mandatory though the school will decide the number. ''They cannot tell us we are reserving 1% seats for this because we are again looking at a minimum of 20% here. In fact, if a school wants to do the entire 75% seats on lottery, we do not have a problem,'' Singh clarified. He added that for EWS students, the money will be reimbursed by the government. ''For schools which got land from the government, we will reimburse the fees for 10% of the EWS students as according to the land allotment condition, schools need to give 15% seats to EWS students. For others, we will reimburse for the entire 25%,'' he said.

Related: Nursery Admissions 2011

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