Rethinking Parental Protest In Delhi’s Private Schools

For decades, India’s middle class has been urged to “invest in your child’s future.” But in 2025, parents across Delhi and other metro cities began asking a different question: At what cost?

Since March, a new pattern of resistance has emerged in the capital city, one marked by growing impunity among private schools and a wave of parental protest. What began as online petitions soon escalated to street demonstrations outside elite schools and mobilisations at Jantar Mantar and Chhatrasal Stadium. Most recently, the United Parents Voice (UPV), a parent-led coalition, met with Delhi’s Chief Minister to raise concerns over the Delhi School Education (Transparency in Fixation and Regulation of Fees) Bill, 2025.

The DPS Dwarka episode was a turning point. It moved from petitions to protests to state-level talks within six months, a rare trajectory for parental mobilisation. This shift signals a deeper rupture: the unease of India’s neoliberal middle class with the very system it helped normalise.

These are families who once saw private schooling as an escape from the failings of public education. Now, they find themselves burdened by skyrocketing fees, opaque decision-making, and exclusion from institutional governance. While the Delhi government’s recent ordinance offers some regulatory mechanisms, it has also drawn criticism. At the core lies the ‘15 per cent parent objection clause’, which mandates that a minimum of 15 per cent of parents must collectively object before a school’s fee hike can be contested. Though seemingly democratic, the clause weakens individual voices and complicates timely redress. It raises critical questions about who gets to object, how collective dissent is measured, and whether this threshold discourages accountability and inclusion.

A New Wave Protest: ‘Middle-Class Politics of Education’

As arbitrary fee hikes mount and the threat of expulsions grows, a deeper political transformation is underway: What politics do these parents represent? This is not a protest in the traditional sense: it is a reckoning, an attempt by middle-class parents to confront the contradictions of market-driven schooling. Once seen as disciplined, aspirational consumers of private education, they are now repositioning themselves as dissenters within that very framework.

Herein lies the tension: how does one protest a system one has long benefited from? The protests reveal a new and uncertain political subjectivity: one that refuses to remain silent while questioning a structure they helped sustain. These parents are not demanding access; they already have it. Instead, they are challenging how access is governed, who determines its costs, and why, despite being the primary funders, they are excluded from decision-making. The government’s response remains largely reactive - addressing symptoms, not structures. What is needed is not just regulation but a rethinking of who holds legitimacy and voice in education policy.

What sets this wave of protest distinct is not just who is protesting and mobilising but how. In the absence of formal platforms, parents have turned to informal, digital infrastructures. Hashtags like #SchoolFeeHike, #DPSDwarka, #ParentsProtest, along with petitions and social media groups (WhatsApp), which are not just complaints, but instruments of political expression. They reflect how middle-class anxieties are being articulated in a hyper-networked age.

This informal digital public sphere allows parents to speak and articulate demands, though not always in the language of rights, but in the language of value, fairness, and accountability.

Screenshots of minutes of meetings, fee breakdowns, voice notes, and RTI templates circulate rapidly. This protest is relational and affective, built on shared exhaustion and the desire to reclaim agency over their children's futures.

While the movement may lack ideological critique, or formal unity or structure, it demands serious political analysis. It reveals how dissent is being reshaped in the digital age by middle-class parents, especially among those long seen as institutionally embedded and politically disengaged. The protests reflect a deeper disquiet within India’s education economy. They mark a shift in how middle-class parents view themselves: not as passive recipients of private schooling, but as emergent (political) actors navigating and confronting the contradictions of a commodified system.

Their mobilisation may be cautious and fragmented, but it raises critical questions: Who has a voice in education governance? What counts as participation? And how can a system claim legitimacy if even its most privileged feel excluded?

If India’s education system is to become more equitable and accountable, it must start by recognising parents not merely as fee-paying stakeholders but as active participants in shaping its rules, its values, and its future.

(Arunima Naithani and Reshmi Chakraborty are independent researchers and academics. Their views are personal.)