Smriti Irani’s Q & A session falls flat

HRD minister Smriti Irani’s initiative to field questions of the general public with regards to issues turned out to be a damp squib on Tuesday after the Facebook page where the question-answer session was to take place crashed within 15 minutes of Ms Irani inviting questions. The Forum for Fairness in Education (FFE) that had encouraged parents to ask questions said that even though the page crashed and Ms Irani did not return, they had asked the parents to post their questions again so that the questions were in public domain.

On Monday the HRD minister had invited people to join her on her Facebook page and ask questions. The tweet read “Will take questions from citizens tomorrow between 1:30-2:30 PM on https://www.facebook.com/Smriti.Irani.Official Looking forward to a positive dialogue. Do join!” The invite prompted nearly 6,000 people to log in and no sooner had Irani started answering questions than the page crashed and people could not see the page anymore.

Jayant Jain, president of Forum for Fairness in Education (FFE), said his organisation saw this as an excellent opportunity to apprise Ms Irani of the exploitation of parents by private school managements and hence asked all member parents of his organisation to field questions to the minister.

“There is absolute anarchy and private school are exploiting parents as per their whims. Even though there are strong laws to stop it nothing is being done by the administrators, hence I thought it would be a good way to reach out to Ms Irani and get the issue addressed. However, within 15 minutes of Ms Irani fielding questions the page crashed. I encouraged the parents to post their questions so that Ms Irani could address them whenever she accessed her page again,” said Mr Jain.

The FFE has around 3,000 member parents and has been raising issues pertaining to capitation fees, donations and commercialisation of education by private school managements.