As the High Court completely quashed the lieutenant Governor’s guidelines on nursery admission on Friday, the one thing that several parents who stay in far flung areas and principals of schools are happy with is the scrapping of the neighbourhood criteria as deciding factor in the admissions.
While the neighbourhood criteria will still exist as per the 2007 Ganguly Committee recommendations, it will no longer be the deciding factor when it comes to nursery admissions. So now parents can admit their students in schools that don’t fall in the 8 km radius of their residence as well.
The neighbourhood criteria was a much opposed one as parents were restricted to admit their students only into a school within the 8 km radius of their residence. As per Jung’s points-based system, a total of 70 out of 100 points were given to only neighbourhood quota.
Principal of Springdales School Ameeta Mulla Wattal said, “The neighbourhood quota was completely chaotic last year. To fill 20 seats of nursery last year I had 8,000 people with the same points applying. It is so unfair to limit people within a certain radius.”
Principal of Tagore International, Madhulika Sen added that parents should be given the choice of which school their child wants to go to. “Even for the schools, I would like to take students from all over Delhi especially when I have buses which go to those places. With this neighbourhood rule I actually had a few areas where buses were overloaded and a few areas where they would be empty,” said Sen.
Wattal feels that Delhi is not ready for something like neighbourhood criteria. She said, “Unfortunately not all areas in Delhi have good school and some areas are there where there is a huge bunch of good schools. Since government schools don’t offer nursery the entire pressure of nursery comes onto the private schools which are not exactly situated in every corner of the city. There are still places where within an 8 km radius there is no good school for nursery.”