How FFRC Became a Paper Tiger in Jammu & Kashmir (Part 1)
I Ahmed Wani
For over a decade, parents in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir have been sold a comforting lie: that a powerful watchdog called the Fee Fixation and Regulation Committee (FFRC) stands between them and the rapacious greed of private school managements. On paper, the body chaired by Justice (Retd.) Sunil Hali is armed with quasi-judicial teeth: it can fix fees, impose penalties up to ten percent of a school’s annual revenue, recommend de-recognition, even appoint administrators. In reality, it has become the most expensive placebo ever prescribed to the middle and lower-middle class of this conflict-battered region.
Walk into any private school in Srinagar’s Rajbagh or Jammu’s Gandhi Nagar and you will still see fee receipts bloated with heads that FFRC itself banned years ago – “admission fee”, “re-admission fee”, “infrastructure development charge”, “smart-class fund”, “generator charge”. Parents pay because the alternative is to pull their child out mid-session and watch years of effort collapse. The committee, headquartered in a quiet lane of Srinagar’s Gupkar Road and a modest office in Jammu, issues circular after circular – 58 in 2025 alone – yet the violations continue with brazen impunity.
The numbers are damning. According to data quietly compiled by the Directorate of School Education (leaked to local journalists in October 2025), 781 private schools – roughly one in every five registered institutions – were found operating without submitting their fee structure for 2024-25 and 2025-26. FFRC’s response? A single order barring them from collecting fees till compliance, followed by… nothing. Not a single school has been recovered, not a single recognition cancelled. Schools simply waited for the storm to pass, then resumed collections with minor cosmetic reductions.
Even when FFRC does act, the punishment is laughable. Minto Circle English Medium School, Srinagar, was fined ₹9.60 lakh in August 2024 for “repeated and deliberate overcharging”. The amount was exactly three percent of its previous year’s revenue – the upper limit for a second offence. Parents point out that the school collected at least four times that amount in illegal admission fees in the single admission cycle of 2025. The fine was pocket change, a cost of doing business.
Justice Hali, a respected former judge of the High Court, projects an image of judicial detachment. In public statements he speaks of “balancing the interests of institutions and parents” and “avoiding knee-jerk measures that could close down schools”. To a daily-wage labourer in Baramulla or a shawl weaver in Anantnag, those words ring hollow. “He sits in a heated chamber and talks of balance,” says Abdul Majid, a driver who pulled his daughter out of a reputed school in Pulwama after the annual fee jumped from ₹38,000 to ₹61,000 in two years. “My balance is already broken.”
The deepest betrayal, parents say, is FFRC’s refusal to touch the sacred cow of infrastructure. While the committee pores over balance sheets and prospectus promises, it has never once ordered a district-wise audit of playgrounds, laboratories or classroom size. In Kashmir Division alone, credible estimates by the J&K Private Schools Coordination Committee (ironically) place the figure at 42–45 percent of private schools functioning without a proper playground. In Jammu it hovers around 30 percent. Children who pay ₹60,000–₹1,20,000 a year “learn sports” on rooftops, corridors, or nearby graveyards. FFRC’s silence on this issue is deafening, because fixing it would mean confronting powerful builders and land mafias who converted playgrounds into commercial complexes years ago.
As winter approaches, another ritual humiliation awaits parents: the transport fee circus. For years, families begged for a simple rule – if a child does not use the school bus for three months of winter vacation, do not charge. Justice Hali’s grand compromise in December 2024 was to allow schools to charge fifty percent if they own the fleet. The message was clear: the regulator negotiates with profiteers, not for the poor.
In the next part, we will examine how the annual fee replaced the banned admission fee, how “crèche-cum-schools” became the newest extortion racket, and why the education department itself has become the biggest enabler of this chaos. The story of FFRC is not just one of regulatory failure; it is the story of an elite capture of childhood itself.
