The Rajasthan government will soon introduce a bill in the state assembly to regulate private educational institutions from schools to universities with an aim to reduce stress on students, especially those studying in private coaching institutes or taking offline tutorials, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
The proposed draft bill, ‘The Rajasthan Private Educational Regulatory Authority Bill-2022’, prohibits private institutes from glorifying success of toppers in any examination, prescribes an aptitude test for admission in private coaching institutes and makes registration of all coaching institutes, even if they are running only online classes, mandatory with the government.
Some other state governments such as Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka have regulators for private education providers. The central government has higher education regulators such as University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
The draft says, to curb the practice of high fee by coaching institutes, the bill says the authority will develop a framework to regulate fees and will make it mandatory for the coaching/tuition centres to publicly display details of their fee structure to avoid any fraudulent practices. “The authority will take steps to rein in the malpractices of bogus advertising, false claims (number of students selected in a particular exam, name of faculty and others) of coaching centres”.
Before the bill is tabled, the Rajasthan government has issued guidelines for the coaching centres to prevent mental stress to students. The guidelines seek the coaching institutes to provide psychological services to students for combating stress and study pressure; safety and security of students; facilities to strengthen their mental health; orientation programme for students and parents; cyber café; career counselling; easy exit policy and fee refund; and complaint portal etc.
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