Girls outshine boys in nursery list too

New Delhi: With many schools releasing their second list of selected candidates, girls appear to have taken away a big slice of the nursery admission pie in the national capital but parents are disappointed and complain that schools have flouted rules.

The results show that on average over 70 per cent girls have managed to make into the lists in many schools, while the ratio is more than 95 per cent in a reputed school in Dwarka.

The list of about 430 selected children available on the website of St Thomas' School in Dwarka shows that less than 10 boys have been able to make the cut.

"There's hardly any boy in the list. Being a co-ed school it should have been fair with both the genders," said Mandeep Kapoor, who has applied in the school for his son's admission.

"If not, they should have mentioned it earlier, so that we would have not wasted out time in applying in the school," said another parent, not wishing to be named.

"My son has been selected in the school, but I am just reluctant to send my child to the school," she said.

When asked, the school's admission coordinator Neebha said, "We preferred girl children for admission into nursery classes. The few boys whose names appeared in the list were actually decided by the school management."

The other reputed schools in the city that have given undue preference to girls included Birla Vidya Niketan, Pushpa Vihar; Heritage School, Vasant Kunj, G D Goenka Vasant Kunj among others.

Experts attribute this skewed girl-boy ratio to faults in the points system being followed by schools this year.

"The roots of the problem stem from the defects in the points system. Many schools gave points separately under 'girl child' and 'first child', which have given an edge to girls over boys this year," says Sumit Vohra, founder of online parents forum 'Admissionsnursery.com'.

"Giving incentives to girls is not bad. But it is needed more in rural set ups not in metros like Delhi," he reasoned.

Ashok Ganguly, the former CBSE chairmen who devised the points system for Delhi schools in 2007, pointed out that lack of a uniform points system is the key reason behind this problems.

"Unless a uniform selection procedure is being followed strictly across the board, such problems are likely to surface every admission season," he said.