Had Maoist students suspended their agitation a little earlier, noted educationist Satyanarayan Bahadur Shrestha, 89, would have spent his last days in peace. Last week, the social reformer had to die watching the spectre of union leaders locking up school principal's rooms.

Opting out of active politics after the overthrow of the Rana regime, SB founded three prominent schools in the Kathmandu valley-Tribhuban Adarsha Vidya Mandir, Mahendra Vidyashram, and Adarsha Vidya Mandir or AVM. The Panchayat regime put a stop to private initiative in school education, and no new SB was born in the country for the next quarter of a century.

Private schools made a fresh start only in the wake of the referendum-induced changes in the governance in the early eighties. But when the lid of control was lifted after the success of the People's Movement in 1990, there was a sudden rush to open schools all over the country. Many of them began as commercial enterprises and continue to be run as such.

The comfortable class was attracted by the novelty of private schools, and the bourgeoisie began to desert public schools en masse. Shorn of their best and brightest, government schools were soon caught in the vicious circle of decreasing intake, falling standard, worsening image and dwindling reputation.

But, if public schools are in a mess, the lot of the 'English Boarding Schools' in the country aren't any better. There is an urgent need to bring private schools in the ambit of some kind of a regulatory mechanism.

The reform must begin by accepting that private schools are here to stay. They can't be wished away howsoever the egalitarians may want them to. In the medium term at least, it is pointless to bemoan the class distinction that the private schools are creating. Since even the Maoist leadership has publicly endorsed the role of private capital in its 'New Model' of democracy, the right to exercise free choice can't be denied to any discerning consumer.

Second, agitating students had erred grievously by putting all private schools in one category. All public schools may be more or less the same, but private schools can be categorised into at least four groups: Deluxe, Exclusive, Superior and Economy. In order to make them more socially relevant, each one of them needs a different approach of monitoring and evaluation.

It would be counter-productive to insist that Deluxe schools decrease their fees. These cater to the status needs of well-off parents. High fees are their USP. If they were to reduce their charges, they would immediately lose their customers to pricey competitors in Mussoorie, Shimla, Darjeeling or Kodaikanal.

Deluxe schools need to be encouraged to hike their fees and add more glamour to their bouquet-riding club, polo, sauna and heated swimming pools are not luxuries for kids likely to be chauffeured to their school in Japanese SUVs.

If status defines deluxe schools, it's aspiration that drives ambitious parents to Exclusive schools.
The rush to get into the Exclusive schools is fuelled by the desire of upper class parents in their Marutis and Santros to be keep up and be one up on the Janardan next door. A ceiling on fee is not the correct way of regulating Exclusive schools either. It would be more appropriate to oversee the functioning of such schools by an independent body patterned after consumer courts. They should be made to open their accounts, not lock them up. All Deluxe and Exclusive schools must publish their balance sheets periodically, and pay certain royalty on their turnover.

Some of the Deluxe and Exclusive schools are akin to Export Promotion Zones for human resources. Further corporatisation of these two categories of schools would be a sensible option. If the government has no objection to the commercialisation of health services, why whine about efficiently managed quality schools?

Capacity is the key strength of Superior schools, and they can use the economy of scale to cut their prices to a certain extent. But even in this category, growth in supply hasn't been able to keep up with the spiralling demand. Most Superior schools are so overloaded that they can't fiddle with the student to teacher ratio any further. All that the government can do is to ask the management of these schools to keep their books open for the guardians and the press.

That leaves the bulk-the Economy class of private schools. Most of these me-to enterprises are shoestring mom-and-pop operations. If they are making any money, it must be by fleecing teachers, not by over-charging parents. There is no way fees of these schools can be reduced without forcing them to pay their staff sweatshop wages.

With the parents who send their children to any of these private schools, fee is seldom the core issue. The affordability and willingness to pay govern access to private schools. The market forces govern values of their services. There is very little that the government can do except monitoring to see that these schools deliver what
they promise.

Agitating students affiliated to political parties are barking up the wrong tree. To check the commercialisation of school education, it's much more sensible to begin by improving the condition of government schools-about 80 percent of all schools in the country are still built-owned-operated by the government. But that is another
story.