Two things make running a school in Maharashtra different from running one anywhere else in India. The first is a fee statute with an explicit percentage ceiling and a parent-majority committee. The second is a language law with a rupee penalty attached and an inspection schedule to enforce it. Both apply regardless of which board your school is affiliated to.
This page covers what those rules require and what they imply for the systems a school runs on — whether it is an SSC/HSC school under the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) or a CBSE, ICSE or IB campus in the same state.
Nine divisional boards, one state board
MSBSHSE conducts the SSC and HSC examinations through nine divisional boards: Pune, Nagpur, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Mumbai, Kolhapur, Amravati, Nashik, Latur and Konkan. A school’s correspondence, examination logistics and result queries route through its divisional board, not directly to Pune.
That matters in a mundane but expensive way: candidate data, subject combinations and internal assessment marks are submitted per division, and a mismatch between what the school holds and what was uploaded is discovered late. Keeping subject enrolment, stream and section as structured fields — rather than as columns in an exam-season spreadsheet — is the difference between a correction and a crisis.
Who proposes the fee, and who approves it
The Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Regulation of Fee) Act, 2011 (Mah. VII of 2014) leaves fee proposal with the management of private unaided and permanently unaided schools, and puts approval with the Parent-Teacher Association Executive Committee.
The Amendment Act of 2018 — Maharashtra Act No. XXVIII of 2019, published on 26 August 2019 — reshaped that committee. It requires a minimum of one and a maximum of two parents from each standard, subject to a maximum of thirteen parents; one teacher from each standard subject to a maximum of ten teachers; and one representative of the school management. Two provisos follow:
- the total number of parent members must always exceed the total of teacher members plus the management representative by one; and
- where two parents were appointed from a standard in one academic year, no more than one parent may be appointed from that standard the following year.
The committee is, by construction, parent-controlled. A fee proposal that cannot be explained head by head to a room of parents is not a fee proposal that will pass.
Fifteen per cent, and the two ways around it
Section 6(1B), inserted by the 2018 amendment, sets the default: a school that has not declared a fee structure at admission may propose a fee no higher than the previous academic year’s fee plus fifteen per cent, and may increase only after two years from the date the fee was approved by the Executive Committee or the Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee.
There are two documented alternatives:
- Declare in advance (Section 6(1A)). A school may declare, at the time of admission, the standard-wise fee structure for Standards 1 to 10 — either in full or in two parts (1 to 5, and 6 to 10), with the second part declared at least one year before that phase begins. A declared structure is binding on all concerned and must be displayed on the notice board and on the school’s official website.
- Exceed with consent (Section 6(1C)). In unforeseen events a school may go above the fifteen per cent rate, or raise fees before two years have elapsed, with the approval of 76 per cent of parents or the approval of the Executive Committee after furnishing reasons.
If a dispute reaches the Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee, Section 6(4) as substituted lets the management collect, pending decision, the previous year’s fee plus fifteen per cent or the proposed increased fee, whichever is less — and if the fee finally decided is higher than what was collected, no penal interest is recoverable from parents. Appeals run to the Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee within thirty days, extendable to sixty for sufficient reason; a parents’ appeal must carry a form signed by each aggrieved parent.
An amendment Bill was issued on 21 March 2025 proposing further changes to this process, including a thirty-day approval window, display in relevant languages, a fifteen-day parent objection period and a support threshold for escalating to the Divisional Fee Committee. Confirm the notified position with the School Education Department before relying on it.
Marathi is compulsory in every school, on every board
Under the Maharashtra Compulsory Teaching and Learning of Marathi Language in Schools Act, 2020 (Maharashtra Act No. III of 2020, enacted 9 March 2020), Marathi has been a compulsory subject from Class 1 to Class 10 in all schools since the 2020-21 academic year, irrespective of board or medium.
Enforcement has since been tightened. A government resolution reported in April 2026 requires schools to appoint eligible, duly qualified Marathi teachers, and sets out the mechanism: inspection roughly two months into each academic year by a team including a Marathi expert, a deputy director, the district education officer and an education inspector; a show-cause notice with fifteen days to respond where non-compliance is found; a penalty of ₹1,00,000; appeal to the Director of School Education; and de-recognition determined by the Education Commissioner.
For a CBSE or ICSE campus this is a staffing and timetable question with an audit attached. The evidence asked for — that Marathi appears as a subject in every class from 1 to 10, that qualified teachers are assigned to those periods, and that the periods actually ran — lives in subject master data, teacher assignments, the timetable and the daily teaching record.
The three-language question is still open
In April 2025 the state issued an order making Hindi a compulsory third language for Classes 1 to 5 in English and Marathi medium schools. An amended GR in June 2025 made it optional, and at the end of June 2025 the government scrapped the three-language GRs entirely and constituted a committee under Dr Narendra Jadhav to review the policy for primary classes. The practical implication is to avoid hard-coding a language scheme: subject sets should be configurable per class and per academic year, and changing them should not require a vendor ticket.
What EdunodeX gives a Maharashtra school
- Language teaching leaves a record. Subjects are defined per class with electives; the timetable assigns teachers to periods; and the structured teaching diary prefills each day’s entries from timetable periods, the planned topic, attendance and homework, with the teacher confirming the day in one action and adjusting only the periods that differed. A principal or mentor review loop lets a reviewer mark entries reviewed or flagged.
- Fee heads and history survive an appeal. A single per-student ledger holds fee items, plan installments, concessions with a per-installment audit record, penalties shown separately and waivable with attribution, waivers, write-offs, settlements and reversals. Amounts are stored as integers in paise; receipt numbers come from a database sequence.
- Year-on-year comparison is native. Academic years carry a current-year flag with cross-year data isolation, so “previous academic year fee” is a query rather than a reconstruction — which is exactly the number Section 6(1B) turns on.
- Fee structures can be published, not just printed. Because the ledger holds the head structure, the same structure can be exported for the notice board and the website that Section 6(1A) requires.
- Parent messaging works in Marathi. WhatsApp replies come back in the language the parent wrote in, including Marathi, with amounts, dates and names computed in code and preserved verbatim rather than regenerated by a model. Business-initiated messages go out only through Meta-approved templates, with per-guardian opt-in recorded and STOP and START keywords honoured automatically. The staff console itself ships in English and Hindi, alongside Tamil and Kannada.
- Board-appropriate assessment. Grading systems for CBSE, ICSE and state boards, exam terms with weightages, report cards with scholastic and co-scholastic sections, and per-question competency tagging.
- Access is scoped server-side. Teachers can read and write attendance only for classes assigned to them in the current academic year; the check is enforced in the backend, not by hiding a menu.
- Compliance is evaluated, not asserted. A rules-driven compliance engine with state-specific overrides re-evaluates weekly and produces a per-category report, alongside a UDISE export.
Before you buy
Ask to see three screens with your own data in them: a student’s full fee history including a partial payment and a reversal; a class timetable showing Marathi periods with the assigned teacher; and last academic year’s fee structure alongside this year’s. If any of the three needs a custom report, budget for that report.
On tax: fees for education up to higher secondary at a recognised institution are exempt from GST under Entry 66 of Notification 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate) dated 28 June 2017.