India’s Centre Arms School Committees With Real Power
New MoE rules make school committees mandatory nationwide, extend them to Class 12, and give them control over small civil works.
The Ministry of Education has shifted school governance one rung downward without giving up the centre’s hand on the rules. In new guidelines launched by Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on May 6, the ministry made School Management Committees mandatory for every school, including secondary schools up to Class 12, replacing existing School Management Development Committees and giving the new bodies authority over budgets, small works, and monitoring of food and grants, according to 
The Hindu.
Power moves to the school gate
This is not a symbolic decentralisation. The rules say 75% of committee members must be parents or guardians, half must be women, and the committees can execute civil works worth up to ₹30 lakh; above that, they join the tendering process, The Hindu. They will also review school budgets, track receipts and expenditures, monitor PM-POSHAN meal quality, and prepare three-year School Development Plans, the paper reported.
The political logic is clear: Delhi is trying to make local accountability visible while keeping policy control central. The ministry is not handing powers to states; it is issuing a national template that states and Union territories can “harmonise” with their own rules, The Hindu. That means the Centre gets the credit for reform, but the operational burden lands on school heads, district officials, and parent bodies.
Why this matters now
The timing is driven by a familiar problem: government schools are still short on basics. A recent The Hindu report on UDISE+ data showed that out of 14.71 lakh schools, 1.52 lakh had no functional electricity, 67,000 lacked functional toilets, and only 50% had computers for teaching and learning. In that setting, decentralisation is less about ideology than about getting repairs, procurement, and monitoring done faster than state departments usually manage.
That also explains why the Centre has broadened the committee’s remit from advice to execution. The ministry wants committees that can spot missing toilets, broken classrooms, and delayed grants before they become audit findings. 
The Times of India noted that the revised framework is being presented as part of the NEP 2020 push for participatory, community-driven governance — not as a new institution, but as a stronger version of an existing one under the Right to Education Act.
That matters because the Centre is betting on a simple bargain: parents will exert pressure where bureaucracies cannot. If the committees work, the gain goes to the ministry, local elected representatives, and parents who can finally see where the money goes. If they do not, the blame will fall on schools already overextended by compliance, construction, and welfare duties.
What to watch next
Watch how states rewrite their own rules around the national framework, especially on who chairs these committees and how much procurement authority they actually get. The key test is whether the new School Management Committees can move beyond paper plans and fix infrastructure before the next academic cycle begins — the one-month deadline from school reopening will show whether this is real decentralisation or just a new layer of supervision, The Hindu, The Times of India.
