Delhi’s School Fee Law and the Crisis Beneath It

Scale and Reach: How Many Schools and Students Are Actually Affected

The practical impact of the 2025 Act is far larger than the courtroom arguments might suggest. Delhi has approximately 1,700–1,800 private unaided schools, enrolling an estimated 3–4 million students, depending on the year and classification. Private unaided institutions account for well over half of all school enrolments in the National Capital Territory, particularly at the primary and middle-school levels.

This means the new fee-approval regime does not affect a marginal subset of elite institutions; it reshapes the operating framework for the dominant mode of schooling in the city. Even modest procedural delays or uncertainty in fee approval can cascade into staffing decisions, infrastructure maintenance, scholarship provisioning, and classroom capacity—effects that ultimately feed back into parents through reduced choice or informal cost-shifting.

In scale terms, Delhi’s intervention is among the most expansive fee-regulation experiments attempted by any Indian State, which explains why the litigation is being closely watched beyond the capital.

The Government’s Rationale: Transparency and Anti-Profiteering

The Delhi government enacted the law in August 2025, following sustained protests by parents over what they described as arbitrary and opaque fee hikes by private schools. The statute was formally notified on 10 December 2025.

The law explicitly seeks to curb the commercialisation of education, invoking the objectives of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Section 3 prohibits schools from charging any fee beyond what is fixed or approved under the Act, while additional provisions empower authorities to:

• Verify school accounts, and
• Order refunds where excess fees are found to have been collected.

Notably, the definition of “school” under the Act is expansive. It covers private unaided schools, whether recognised or unrecognised, minority or non-minority, and includes schools that received land at concessional rates from government agencies, as well as those affiliated to Indian or foreign boards.

Why Private Schools Are Challenging the Law

Private school associations—including the Public Schools on Private Lands Society, the Delhi Public School Society, and groups such as Justice for All—have mounted a constitutional challenge, arguing that the Act fundamentally undermines their autonomy.

Their central claim is that the law introduces a “multi-tiered, invasive, and bureaucratic” system that effectively places fee-setting powers in the hands of committees subject to government oversight. According to the petitioners, this violates settled Supreme Court jurisprudence recognising the administrative and financial autonomy of private unaided educational institutions, most notably in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka ruling.

The petitions specifically challenge:

• Sections 3 to 8, which restrict fee increases without approval and govern committee-based regulation;
• Sections 11 and 12, which grant special supervisory and enforcement powers to the Director of Education; and
• Section 17, which bars the jurisdiction of civil courts.

Schools argue these provisions impose disproportionate restrictions that violate fundamental rights under Articles 14, 19(1)(c), and 19(1)(g) of the Constitution—relating to equality, freedom of association, and the right to practise a profession or occupation.

The Supreme Court Precedent Line: Where Regulation Ends and Control Begins

The constitutional dispute over Delhi’s 2025 fee law sits squarely on a long and carefully calibrated line of Supreme Court precedent that permits regulation without control, but draws a firm line at state takeover of core financial decisions in private unaided education.

In T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka, the Court recognised that while education is not a purely commercial activity, private unaided institutions enjoy autonomy over administration and finances, subject only to reasonable regulation to prevent profiteering and capitation fees. That autonomy was narrowed—but not dismantled—in Islamic Academy of Education v. State of Karnataka, where the Court allowed regulatory committees to review fee structures for fairness, not to approve or fix fees in advance. The position was reaffirmed in P.A. Inamdar v. State of Maharashtra, which warned that regulation cannot be so intrusive that it amounts to nationalisation by procedure.

What makes Delhi’s 2025 Act constitutionally novel is its shift from post-facto scrutiny to prior approval. By mandating committee clearance before any fee increase, and embedding government observers and appellate oversight at multiple levels, the law moves closer to ex ante price control—the precise form of intervention earlier benches cautioned against. This is the red line the Delhi High Court will ultimately have to locate with precision.

The Administrative Feasibility Question: Can This System Actually Work?

Beyond constitutionality lies a quieter but critical question: administrative feasibility. The 2025 Act requires every covered school to constitute a 10-member committee, prepare a three-year fee proposal, convene meetings with parent and teacher representatives selected by lottery, and accommodate a Directorate of Education observer—all within compressed timelines.

In practical terms, this implies the near-simultaneous formation and oversight of thousands of committees, the review of thousands of multi-year financial plans, and the potential handling of hundreds of appeals by district fee appellate authorities. Any bottleneck—lack of observers, delayed committee formation, or unresolved disputes—risks freezing fee decisions mid-academic cycle.

Private schools argue that this transforms regulation into procedural price control: even without explicitly fixing fees, the sheer density of approvals and appeals can constrain increases by default. Courts, when assessing proportionality, have historically weighed not only legislative intent but also whether a regulatory design is cap hookup-able at scale without paralysing the system.

Conflict With the 1973 Framework

A key plank of the challenge is that the 2025 law does not merely “supplement” the existing Delhi School Education Act, 1973, but creates a parallel and conflicting regulatory regime. According to the petitioners, the new statute supplants the earlier framework by shifting from oversight to direct control over fee fixation, upsetting the balance previously struck between regulation and institutional independence.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the schools, told the court that enforcing committee formation across hundreds of private schools within days would lead to administrative chaos, especially without clarity on implementation and dispute resolution.

The Deeper Political-Economy Problem: Why Private School Fees Became the Battleground

The intensity of the confrontation between private schools and the Delhi government is best understood as a political-economy pressure release, not merely a regulatory disagreement. In urban India, particularly in metros like Delhi, private schooling has ceased to be a discretionary choice and has become the default pathway for middle- and lower-middle-income families seeking functional education.

This has transformed school fees into a mass political issue. Parents experience fee hikes not as market pricing, but as unavoidable household shocks, because opting out of private schooling is widely perceived as imposing an educational penalty on their children. In this context, governments face a powerful incentive to be seen as acting decisively against “profiteering,” even when the underlying drivers of cost escalation—teacher salaries, compliance burdens, infrastructure standards, and inflation—are structural rather than opportunistic.

Fee regulation thus becomes an attractive intervention for the State: it is visible, administratively assertive, and politically legible. By contrast, repairing public education systems is slow, fiscally demanding, and yields results only over years. The result is a policy substitution effect—regulating private schools becomes a proxy for addressing dissatisfaction with public schooling, even though it does not resolve the underlying dependency.

This explains why fee control laws often emerge at moments of peak parental frustration, and why they attract strong public support even as they raise complex constitutional and operational questions. The Delhi law must therefore be read not only as an education regulation statute, but as a political response to systemic exit from public schooling.

The Unresolved Reality: Why Public Schooling Has Failed to Compete — and What Would Need to Change

Beneath the fee-regulation debate lies a more uncomfortable, long-standing reality: India’s public school system, especially at the primary level, has failed to inspire parental confidence, particularly in urban and semi-urban settings. This failure has become so normalised that it is rarely interrogated directly.

India spends approximately 2.9–3.1% of GDP on education, with school education accounting for roughly 2% of GDP. This is significantly below the 4–6% of GDP benchmark repeatedly recommended by national policy documents and international bodies. On a per-student basis, India’s public spending at the primary level remains a fraction of that in countries with robust public systems. For comparison, OECD countries spend, on average, 4.5–5% of GDP on education, with substantially higher per-pupil expenditure and stronger local accountability mechanisms.

The consequences are structural. Government schools disproportionately serve first-generation learners but struggle with:

• uneven teacher deployment and absenteeism,
• weak early-grade foundational instruction,
• overcrowded classrooms in urban areas,
• limited school-level autonomy combined with diffuse accountability.

National and international assessments have consistently shown that learning outcomes in public schools lag, particularly in reading comprehension and numeracy by Grades 3–5—precisely the years that shape long-term educational trajectories. This creates a perception gap: even where government schools exist physically, parents perceive them as high-risk options for social mobility.

Globally, the contrast is stark. In countries such as Finland, South Korea, and Canada, strong public schooling is underpinned by:

• sustained public investment,
• rigorous teacher training and professional status,
• early childhood and foundational learning focus,
• and decentralised but accountable school governance.

In these systems, private schooling remains a supplementary choice, not a defensive necessity. In India, the inversion is complete: private schools absorb demand that public systems cannot credibly meet, and fees become the visible cost of a hidden policy failure.

Until public education delivers reliable quality—through higher budgetary commitment, early-learning investment, teacher quality reform, and genuine school-level accountability—private schooling will remain unavoidable for millions. Fee regulation, however stringent, cannot substitute for that transformation.

Seen this way, the Delhi fee law litigation is not just about autonomy versus regulation. It is a judicial and policy moment that exposes a deeper question: whether India is willing to confront the fiscal, administrative, and political costs of rebuilding public education—or continue managing its consequences through private-sector controls.

What Happens Next

For now, the High Court’s refusal to stay the law allows the Delhi government to press ahead with committee formation for the coming academic year. But the constitutional questions—about how far the State can go in regulating private education without eroding autonomy—remain squarely open.

The case is shaping up to be a test of regulatory limits: whether Delhi’s attempt to institutionalise transparency and curb profiteering aligns with Supreme Court precedent, or whether it crosses into impermissible control. The outcome will not only affect private schools in Delhi, but could also influence fee regulation debates across other States, many of which are watching the litigation closely.