Figures, judgments, and official memos seem to flow as easily from Ashish Sood as political barbs. “In 1,070 government schools across Delhi, there are 32,000 classrooms,” he says, tapping the desk for emphasis. “Do you know how many smart classrooms we have? Just 1,700. The previous government didn’t spend a penny on ICT, no language labs, nothing. And in this era of artificial intelligence, where will our children go with such neglect?”
For Sood, a senior BJP leader and Delhi’s current Education Minister, these statistics aren’t merely governance talking points — they are ammunition in a wider battle. Less than a year into power, the BJP government in Delhi is trying to reframe education politics in the capital, long dominated by AAP’s “Delhi Model of Education.” The most visible front in this fight is a new School Education Fee Regulation Bill, which Sood pilots as the centrepiece of the BJP’s promise to “protect parents from exploitation.”
In a wide-ranging conversation at the Delhi Dialogues organised by The New Indian Express this week, the minister outlined his vision: a new law regulating private school fees, massive investment in smart classrooms and ICT labs, upgrading of government schools to rival private institutions, and a push for transparency in school finances.
Fee hike law: A landmark step
Sood began by defending the government’s flagship legislation, the Delhi School Education (Transparency and Fixation of Fee) Act, 2025, which he called “a firm law to protect parents from arbitrary fee hikes.” “For 52 years, education in Delhi was governed by the 1972 Act, when the city was much smaller. In those days, Delhi University results were published on a blackboard. The city has changed, aspirations have grown, but the law hadn’t. We changed that,” Sood said.
Under the new Act, all the 1,700 private schools in the capital will now be regulated. The earlier 1973 law only applied to about 300 schools that had been allotted land at concessional rates by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).
The new system introduces three-level fee regulation committees at the school, district, and appellate levels. Each committee will include parents, school management representatives, and government officials. Crucially, parents will have a veto, and decisions must be unanimous.
“If any school is found charging fees beyond what is approved, penalties will be levied ranging from Rs 50,000 per student to Rs 20 lakh for schools,” Sood warned.
For years, parents’ associations have lobbied for stronger controls, arguing that fee hikes often far outpace inflation and, during the pandemic, continued despite online learning. Courts, too, have intervened. In Delhi Public School Dwarka, parents dragged the management to court over fee hikes, leading to a judicial stay.
The new bill, Sood argues, “is not anti-school but pro-parent.” He points out that the draft was modeled on recommendations from the Justice Anil Dev Singh Committee and the Justice J.S. Verma Committee, both of which examined fee structures and found “irregularities, profiteering, and misuse of funds.”
He also added, ‘Obviously, there are people who, for their own political reasons, are against these things. They have the ecosystem of NGOs who are misguiding the parents. We have decided slowly to go into the RWAs and the other sections of society to explain this Bill. So after that, we will be holding a “townhall” with our parents. We will be having this “chai pe charcha’ between our MLAs and the parents. So this is one of the very big achievements.”
For the BJP, the bill is apparently more than governance. Education has been AAP’s strongest calling card since 2015. Instead of contesting AAP’s ‘government schools’ narrative directly, the BJP is betting on middle-class anxieties over private school fees.
“Look, this government doesn’t believe in hollow advertisements,” Sood says, with a pointed reference to AAP’s campaigns that flooded metro stations and bus shelters with images of new classrooms. “We believe in real reforms — where parents feel relief in their monthly household budget. That is why the BJP’s education model is holistic. It covers government schools, but also where 60 percent of Delhi’s children actually study in private schools.”
The scale of the challenge
When asked the difference between the AAP’s and the BJPs’s education model, Ashish Sood said, “We will never be able to counter them. When I say, we’ll never be able to counter them, because we’ll not be able to match their tokenism. We will not be able to match the hollow marketing ecosystem they have created. We will never be able to counter them or match them because they have a very big hollow marketing system supported by NGOs.”
He further added, “When I say this, we have visited many schools in these four months. Few days ago, I went to Najafgarh in a school that was my second visit. I was told that in the last 10 years, I am the first person as Education Minister who has visited there twice or thrice. In 10 years, in that remote corner of Delhi, the Education Minister, as they claim, I don’t give a claim. They said that the Education Minister never came here. He came to lay the foundation stone of the school building named Bhagat Singh Sainik School and the building is still incomplete.”
Beyond tokenism: “Holistic education”
When asked how the BJP government planned to counter AAP’s political branding of education, Sood replied: “We cannot counter them in tokenism. They had photo ops and slogans. We have a firm resolve backed by budgetary allocations.”
He spoke about “holistic education” that includes both regulation of private schools and upgradation of government schools.
“So when we talk about holistic education, we mean equipping government schools with modern technology and exposure, so that children from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t feel left behind. When they step out of these schools, they should not feel like outsiders. They should be fully aware of the opportunities around them,” the minister said.
For years, parents have protested fee hikes, with cases dragging on for years. “In DPS Dwarka, the case has been in court for seven years. Children were made to sit in libraries as punishment when parents resisted fee hikes. That ends now,” Sood said.
Sharing the plan for the city schools, Ashish Sood said that 21,000 smart classrooms are to be built in the next five years, 5,000 smart boards in a single year, 175 AI driven Abdul Kalam language labs and 160 new digital libraries.
Sood said: “AAP never thought of. Their obsession was with PR, not pedagogy.” Official documents show the government has sanctioned new computer labs in 200 schools this year, with plans to expand.
There is also another proposal to integrate National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommendations, such as coding and financial literacy, into the curriculum.
Focus on learning outcomes
Sood stressed that modernization would not stop at infrastructure. The government is implementing NIPUN (Foundational Literacy and Numeracy) certification across all schools.
“Too often, a Class 5 child cannot read a Class 3 English book. That’s unacceptable. Smart boards may look like optics, but NIPUN ensures accountability in learning outcomes,” he explained.
Sports facility
Delhi is now the state which offers the largest amount for one who gets a medal in the Olympics or any international event or any state event and all those things.
Taking forward this issue, Sood said, “We are offering Rs 7 crore to a person who is getting an Olympic medal or some similar commonwealth Asian games and all. Those students who are practising for state or national excellence in sports and in the awards for them who are regularly practising at a particular level who have a consistency, we are offering them Rs 5 lakh. We are coming out with a sports policy and very soon we are working on it.”
“Delhi has often lost its athletes to neighbouring Haryana, which offers lucrative jobs and incentives. “Wrestlers train at Delhi’s Chhattrasal Stadium but represent Haryana because they get Class I jobs there,” Sood said.
Does this mean an increased budget?
The obvious question of resources, he acknowledged, was already being addressed: the government had passed a budget of nearly Rs 1 lakh crore, about 27–28 percent higher than that of the previous administration. While the earlier government had earmarked around Rs 15,500–16,000 crore for education in its last budget, the current allocation stands close to Rs 20,000 crore. In absolute terms, he insisted, spending on education has clearly gone up, even if critics continue to argue that the sector is being given priority only “for the sake of statistics.”
Teacher recruitment: Tackling a backlog
A long-standing problem in Delhi’s education system is the heavy reliance on guest teachers. Out of 1.25 lakh sanctioned posts, over 20,000 are filled by guest teachers, many of whom have been in the system for 10–15 years. Sood acknowledged the issue: DSSSB exams for permanent recruitment were delayed for years.
Many guest teachers have now crossed the age limit for permanent posts. The present government is considering “holistic solutions” to give them stability, he said.
Transparency in school finances
One of the most ambitious initiatives is the auditing of all 1,700 schools’ financial records.“Until now, out of 1,700 schools, financial records were sought from only 75. Some schools voluntarily submitted them, others did not. When these issues came to light, the CM called me and asked me to look into it. On her directions, I asked for reports from all schools. Officials initially resisted, saying it would take too long. But for the first time in Delhi’s governance, SDMs and other officials were deployed to physically collect records from every school,’ Sood said. “We now have the audited reports of all schools. The next step is to verify them. To ensure transparency and avoid allegations of bias, we are floating a tender to hire independent chartered accountants from the open market, just as banks and companies do. They will evaluate the financial records, and the schools will have to submit their audited statements. This will make the entire process more transparent and accountable,” he added.
“Earlier, schools would submit a report saying they wanted a 5% fee increase. The education department just approved it. Nobody checked whether schools had surpluses or deficits,” Sood explained.
Now, the government has:
Collected audited financial reports from all 1,700 schools
Floated tenders to hire independent chartered accountants to evaluate them
Plans to ensure schools cannot run as profit-making enterprises
“This is the first time in Delhi’s governance that SDMs were sent to physically collect records. We now have all the data,” Sood claimed.
Safety audits in government schools
Sood said the government had already begun a pilot 3D safety audit before the recent school tragedy in Rajasthan. “We had seen similar experiments in regions like Sambal and engaged a Hyderabad-based firm for a pilot in Narela,” he explained. “Even before the advisory came, we had started reviewing building conditions in a scientific manner.” The pilot includes a comprehensive 3D structural assessment, with real-time reports now under review. “Earlier, inspections were limited to select areas. Now, we’re going school by school,” he said. A dashboard is also being developed to monitor infrastructure needs—down to whether toilets need repairs.
Urban Development, Power, and Environment
As Urban Development and Power Minister too, Sood has to juggle multiple priorities: Climate change, encroachment, and old infrastructure worsen Delhi’s floods; the government is studying Surat’s drainage model. Power subsidies total Rs 3,600 crore, with solar incentives up to Rs 1.8 lakh via PM Suryaghat Bijli Yojana. Funds aid RWAs to improve parks. A pilot 3D safety audit of Narela schools is under way, with citywide expansion planned. We’re changing that,” he said.
Contrast with AAP
Sood repeatedly contrasted his government’s approach with the previous AAP regime: On “Janta Darbars”: “Kejriwal climbed to the 4th floor to avoid people. Our CM walks the streets.”
On marketing: “We don’t have the ecosystem of NGOs and Public Relations. We come from humble backgrounds. My father was a journalist, my mother a teacher. We can’t match The New York Times coverage, but we can deliver.”
Demolition
Sood dismissed the charge that the recent demolitions in Delhi were carried out on the orders of the state government, pointing instead to the case of the Madrasi Camp at Barapula, where the Delhi High Court had observed that the settlement, though nearly 35 years old, stood on the floodplain of the Barapula drain.
He recalled how the urban flooding of 2023, which left even the Supreme Court inundated, was traced back to such encroachments on floodplains. Acting on the court’s 2023 directive, the government displaced residents, but only after ensuring that around 190 families with Eligibility Dwelling Certificates (EDCs) were provided alternate housing. The policy, he explained, covers only those slums that existed before 2006, based on a survey conducted in 2012, and while the High Court had ensured EDCs were issued, families who settled later remained outside its ambit. With time, he said, these settlements naturally expand as families grow, which is why the government has asked the Centre to broaden the policy framework so in-situ redevelopment can be pursued instead of demolition. “This is why the Chief Minister has said we will not allow demolitions,” Sood underlined, adding that the real challenge lies in adapting redevelopment policies to Delhi’s changing demographic pressures, especially at a time when the city is witnessing unprecedented floods.
Handling so many portfolios! How?
Sood said, “Our leadership has set new public functioning parameters. Evaluations and questioning are done, and performance is being gauged. And when our leaders work for 20 hours, we will have to take inspiration from them and do the same. We came to power 27 years later, and we have a lot of things to do.
Policy reforms at a glance
New Delhi School Fee Regulation Act with parent veto power
Independent auditing of all private school finances
Smart classrooms, AI labs, digital libraries in government schools
Recruitment push to replace thousands of guest teachers
Massive sports incentives to retain Delhi athletes
Focus on literacy and numeracy via NIPUN certification
Solar subsidy model to cut power subsidy burden
Drainage & infrastructure audits to tackle flooding