Rajasthan is one of the few Indian states where fee-setting inside a private school is a statutory procedure with named participants, fixed deadlines and a three-year lock. If you run a school affiliated to the Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan (RBSE, Ajmer), the software you use for fees is not just an accounting convenience — it is where the evidence lives when a parent, a District Education Officer or a Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee asks how a number was arrived at.
This page describes what the law actually says, and what that implies for how a school system should be configured.
What the Rajasthan fee law requires of a school
The Rajasthan Schools (Regulation of Fee) Act, 2016 (Act No. 14 of 2016) applies to private schools in the state. Its constitutional validity was upheld by the Supreme Court on 3 May 2021, with Sections 4, 7 and 10 read down rather than struck out — so the framework below is live law, not a proposal.
The sequence the Act sets out is specific:
- Every private school constitutes a Parent-Teachers Association, formed by the head of the school within thirty days of the start of each academic year. Every teacher and every parent is a member. An annual membership amount of fifty rupees in urban areas and twenty rupees in rural areas is collected from each member (Section 4(1)).
- From the willing parents in that association, a lottery is drawn — with one week’s notice — to constitute the School Level Fee Committee (Section 4(1)(c)).
- The management proposes the fee. It must submit the proposed fee with the relevant records to the School Level Fee Committee at least six months before the commencement of the next academic year (Section 6(2)).
- The committee has thirty days from receiving that proposal to approve a fee, and it has the authority to decide the amount afresh (Section 6(3)).
- The approved fee is binding for three academic years, and the committee must indicate the different heads under which the fee is levied (Sections 6(3) and 6(4)).
- The Parent-Teachers Association must hold a general meeting at least once before 15 August every year (Section 4(2)(e)).
The ten-person committee, and why its composition matters
Section 4(2)(a) fixes the School Level Fee Committee at ten people:
| Role | Who |
|---|---|
| Chairperson | A representative of the management, nominated by the management |
| Secretary | The Principal of the school |
| Members | Three teachers nominated by the management |
| Members | Five parents from the Parent-Teachers Association |
Parents are the largest single block. Their term is one academic year, and a parent who has served cannot re-enter the lottery for three years (Section 4(2)(c)). The list of members has to go up on the notice board within fifteen days of the committee being formed, with a copy to the District Education Officer.
Practically, this means a Rajasthan school cannot treat its fee structure as an internal spreadsheet. Five parents who rotate every year will read the heads you levy, and the committee meets at least once every three months.
Section 8: the factors the committee is allowed to weigh
The Act does not leave the committee to argue in the abstract. Section 8 lists what may be considered: the school’s location; the infrastructure and facilities as stated in the prospectus or on the website; prescribed education standards; expenditure on administration and maintenance; funds received for freeships under government schemes for SC, ST, OBC and SBC students; qualified teaching and non-teaching staff and their salary components; a reasonable allowance for yearly increments; expenditure per student against total income; and a reasonable revenue surplus for development.
Almost every one of those is a number the school already holds — in payroll, the expense ledger, concession records and the fee ledger. The question is whether it can be produced as a coherent statement rather than reconstructed from files.
When the committee cannot agree
If the School Level Fee Committee fails to decide within thirty days, the management refers the matter to the Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee constituted for each revenue division under Section 7 — chaired by the Divisional Commissioner, with the Deputy Director (Secondary Education), a nominee of the Director of Sanskrit Education, a Treasury Officer, the Deputy Director (Elementary Education) as Member-Secretary, two representatives of private schools and two representatives of parents.
During the pendency of that reference the school may collect the previous academic year’s fee plus ten per cent (Section 6(5)). The divisional committee should decide within sixty days, has civil-court powers of summoning and document discovery, and can authorise an officer to enter the school and inspect or seize records, accounts and registers (Section 9). Its order binds the school for three academic years, and a school that has appealed must place the decision on its notice board and website (Section 9(7)). There is no interim stay on the fee determined by the management, but if excess fee has been collected the committee can order a refund — and recover it as an arrear of land revenue if the school does not pay (Section 9(5)).
Three languages on the notice board
Section 6(3) is unusually prescriptive about publication: the approved fee must be displayed in Hindi, in English, and in the school’s respective medium of instruction, and on the school’s website where one exists. For an English-medium school in Jaipur that is two languages; for a Sanskrit-medium or Urdu-medium school it is three. A fee sheet that only exists in English is not compliant.
How EdunodeX handles the Rajasthan fee cycle
EdunodeX keeps fees in a single per-student ledger rather than in per-module silos, which is what makes the Section 8 questions answerable.
- Fee heads are explicit. Fee items carry a category and recurrence; fee plans bundle them per class; installment plans split them into scheduled amounts. Because the committee has to “indicate the different heads under which the fee shall be levied”, the head structure in the software is the head structure you present.
- Concessions are auditable, not overwritten. A scholarship, sibling, staff-child or financial concession is stored as a discount amount on the affected ledger rows with an application record per installment, and it is reversible. The freeship and government-scheme funding that Section 8(e) asks about is therefore reportable, not inferred.
- Penalties are separated from base fee. Late fees are computed against grace days and a flat, percentage or daily formula, are shown separately on the row, and can be waived by an admin or accountant with the waiver recorded. A concession discounts the base fee only, never the penalty.
- Money is stored as integers in paise. Fee amounts never pass through floating-point arithmetic, so a printed receipt and a ledger total cannot drift apart by rounding.
- Receipts are sequenced by the database. Receipt numbers follow
RCP-YYYYMMDD-XXXXXgenerated from a PostgreSQL sequence, so two clerks collecting at the same counter cannot produce the same number. - Expenses, budgets and payroll sit in the same system, with a Tally export using configurable GL mappings, so the administration-and-maintenance expenditure the committee may ask for is not assembled from a separate book.
- Parent messages go out in the parent’s language. WhatsApp replies are answered in the language the parent wrote in — Hindi and Hinglish included — with amounts, dates and names computed in code and preserved verbatim rather than regenerated by a model. The staff console ships in English and Hindi, alongside Tamil and Kannada.
The compliance engine carries fee-regulation rules with state-specific overrides and re-evaluates weekly, and there is a UDISE export for government reporting.
Two portals, two different jobs
Rajasthan runs government and government-aided schools on Shala Darpan. Private schools do not use it; their recognition, RTE admissions under Section 12(1)(c) and the reimbursement that follows are handled through the state’s separate private-school portal. Any vendor who tells a private school it will “integrate with Shala Darpan” has misread which system the school is on — worth checking early in a demo.
Tax position, briefly
Fees charged by a recognised institution providing education up to higher secondary are exempt from GST under Entry 66 of Notification 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate) dated 28 June 2017 — tuition, admission, examination, hostel and transport supplied to its own students. Fee software should not be adding GST to those heads.
There is also no merchant discount rate on BHIM-UPI person-to-merchant transactions. That has applied universally since January 2020 under Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act read with Section 269SU of the Income-tax Act. It is not an education-specific concession, and not something a software vendor grants you.