Shanti Rana, 65, rears goats and stitches clothes to feed and educate her four school-going grandchildren.

The family of five lives in the Madanpur Khadar slum in southeast Delhi, and the children are enrolled in a Delhi government school. The children’s father — Shanti’s son — is dead and their mother does not live with them.

Last February, Shanti’s eldest grandchild, Kirti, paid Rs 1,800 to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to register herself for her Class X board exams, which were scheduled from May 4 to June 16.

With the exams now cancelled because of the Covid surge, Shanti wants the board to refund the money.

“I had arranged the fee with extreme difficulty. My granddaughter was studying well and I wanted her to find a good job in future. But now that the CBSE has cancelled the exam, it should refund us the fee,” Shanti said.

It’s a demand echoed by many other parents and guardians of Class X CBSE students, particularly those not well off.

Ashok Agrawal, member of Delhi University’s executive council and president of the All India Parents Association, said the board must refund the money since it does not have to pay the invigilators and examiners, or spend on setting up exam centres.

“The fee covers all kinds of expenses related to the conduct of the exams. Since the board need not make these expenditures now, it must refund the fees,” Agrawal said.

The CBSE charged exam fees of Rs 1,500 to Rs 1,800 per student depending on the number of subjects they had chosen and the number of practical exams they were to take. Nearly 21.5 lakh students were to sit for the Class X boards.

A school principal who did not wish to be quoted said the board may have already spent a portion of the money preparing the question papers, but it should refund the unspent amount to the students.

Many parents whose children go to private schools in the cities too have supported the demand for a refund.

The CBSE has said it will work out a way of grading the students without a board exam, leaving many students wondering what criteria would be adopted for the allotment of streams in Class XI. The schools usually allot streams on the basis of the students’ board marks.

A message sent to board secretary Anurag Tripathi seeking the CBSE’s stand on the refund demand remained unanswered.

KVS teachers

Teachers at the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan schools have urged the government to restore the original schedule of their annual summer vacation, now that the CBSE has cancelled its Class X board exams and deferred the Class XII exams till June 15.

Summer holidays for the teachers were to extend from May 3 to June 20 but the KVS administration later asked them to come to school till June 2 and help conduct the exams. In a letter to the Union education minister, the teachers’ association has demanded reinstatement of the original vacation schedule.