Despite the court-mandated ban on interviews of children and parents seeking admission to nursery classes, schools in the capital are still continuing to play favourites.

While the court banned the conducting of interviews on the very ground that they were being used as an excuse to provide some children priority over the others, some schools have been misusing the 20-point margin allowed by the Ganguly Committee to favor children of MCD and DDA officials over the children of parents who may not be of that much help to the schools. Closely following the government servants’ children are the children of doctors and engineers who are running a close second in the priority list.

Under this 20-point window, schools have been given the freedom to devise their own category of parameters for admission of children into the nursery classes; in other words, they have been once gain given the freedom to indulge their biases.

According to the new system, kids will be given 1 to 100 points based on various factors like the proximity of their home to the school, having siblings in the same school, being a girl child, and educational qualifications of their parents. A child would also fetch a couple of extra points if his or her parents have studied in the same school or if he or she is an only child.

However, and this is where the schools have been misusing this formula, an additional 20 points that could be scored by these kids have been left at the discretion of individual schools to be awarded on the parameters decided upon by the schools themselves. Making full use of this freedom, the Bal Bharati Public School (on the Ganga Ram Hospital Marg) had decided to give preference to kids whose parents were government officers by awarding a couple of extra points to children whose parents work with the MCD or the DDA or such other government agencies.

The Delhi Public School, on its part, had decided to award five points to children, both of whose parents were working, and another five points to children having a single parent.

According to the Tagore International School, profession of parents was a logical way of knowing the kids' background. Hence, ten points would be given to kids whose parents were engineers or doctors or chartered accountants and preference would also be provided to kids whose parents were businesspersons or were working with MNCs. Magnanimously, the school had also decided to award five points to kids from underprivileged groups.

It still remains to be seen what the government has to say about this blatant misuse of freedom by these schools.