Education Minister Manish Sisodia on Wednesday said that students of Delhi government schools and aided schools would not have to pay any fees to take the Class X and Class XII examination as the cost would be borne by the government and that they were working out the modalities.
He added that talks were on with the CBSE to rollback the recent hike in examination fee but no child would have to pay the fee.
On Tuesday, the CBSE had said that they were in talks with the Delhi government with regard to reimbursement of fee and said that it had decided to restore the practice of charging only ₹50 from SC/ST students. Reacting to the fee hike, Mr. Sisodia had said that the government would have to consider starting its own board if the CBSE continued with its fee hike.
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The fees for general category students for Classes X and XII were doubled from ₹750 to ₹1,500 for five subjects and for SC/ST students from ₹375 to ₹1,200 for five subjects. In Delhi, SC/ST students were only paying ₹50 with the Delhi government giving subsidy.
Justifying the hike in its examination fee, the CBSE said that its expenditure on conducting the Class X and XII exams amounted to approximately ₹500 crore last year while the earnings from student exam fees was less than ₹250 crore. Now, since it was not conducting professional entrance examination that were a source of revenue, it was going back to a no-profit , no-loss model.