-Reshma Ravishanker

Enraged parents across Bengaluru are venting on social media about private unaided schools charging multifold prices for school textbooks and notebooks. They are also calling out the government and judiciary to act suo moto in this regard.

Even as some schools are yet to get textbooks, the ones who have access are fleecing parents, billing them over double the actual price, parents have complained. Similarly, a fee breakup at various schools indicates an inflated price charged for plain notebooks as well.

“I will tell one incident recently we got books from school and vendor has charged service charge in that which is around 176 Rs. There were a few parents waiting for books, but no one bothered to ask questions. I was told it was for logistics. Imagine they take avg of 150 Rs per student and if there are 1000 students imagine the money they are making,” said one parent.

Another said that the private school unabashedly split a usual textbook into two parts and sold it to parents at a higher cost. They alleged that schools had increased prices in the pretext of collecting ‘service charge’.

“The school through their vendor publishing tie up got the books (class 1 to 9) that are widely available in the market, split them into multiple parts, rename the book titles to their choice and doubled and tripled MRP as it was sold as a set now. These titles were not available in the market & parents were forced to buy from school. Few parents got suspicious and decided to investigate.

“They figured out authors of books being sold by school and looked up books by the same author. That’s when they found the scam. The English & social books had the same exact stories, so were other subject books. The parents along with 2000 parents got in touch with the same vendor, placed an order for books and got it at 1/3rd of the cost of what school was charging. Request never trust the school blindly & exercise your choice to buy uniforms, books & accessories,” wrote another parent on the VoiceofParents’s twitter handle.