No points for neighbourhood criterion at some schools

At Apeejay School, Saket and Apeejay School Pitampura there are 10 criteria, including alumni, girl child and first child, based on which applicants are being allotted points.

Some of the schools in Delhi are not giving any points for neighbourhood criterion for nursery admissions under the general category making it difficult for many parents to make it to the list.

Parents say they will be forced to send their kids to far-off schools if neighbourhood criterion is ignored. (Saumya Khandelwal/HT file)

At Apeejay School, Saket and Apeejay School Pitampura there are 10 criteria, including alumni, girl child and first child, based on which applicants are being allotted points.

Some schools are also allotting points to applicants whose parents or grandparents are doctors, civil servants, armed forces, martyrs and diplomatic corps. Though these criteria are discriminatory, DoE officials said they haven’t decided to take an action yet as the schools have autonomy to fix their criteria.

Most of the schools have kept distance as one of the main criterion while allotting points for nursery admissions. According to Ganguly Committee Report on nursery admissions, children living in the neighbourhood should be given priority in admissions.

At Modern School, Vasant Vihar and Raghubir Singh Junior Model School there are no points for neighbourhood criterion. Both the schools have given 40 points each for general category.

However, schools maintained they are not flouting any rules. Principal Apeejay Pitampura, DK Bedi, said that there is no compulsion on the schools to follow the distance criteria. “People use the criteria for all the wrong reasons and to their own advantage... The applicants give false documents to deceive the school and I don’t see any logic in the criteria,” he said.

Directorate of Education had recently asked schools to adopt clear, well defined, equitable, non-discriminatory, unambiguous and transparent criteria for admissions.

“Many schools have given 20-50 points to neighbourhood which is the main criteria. Some schools have not allocated a single point to neighbourhood that means parents staying in that area won’t have any scope of admission as all the criteria are discriminatory points,” said Sumit Vohra, who runs an online portal on nursery admissions.