Mumbai Schools Implement NEP Inconsistently: 1,200 Schools Show Scattered Fee Structures

More than 1,200 schools across Mumbai are now required to operate under the National Education Policy 2020 framework, but fewer than half have submitted complete compliance reports to the Maharashtra School Education Department as of June 30. That gap, roughly 620 institutions still in partial or no compliance, is driving a summer of confusion for families trying to secure admissions for the 2026-27 academic year.

The timing matters because Mumbai's Right to Education quota seats, 25 percent of intake at every private unaided school, opened for online applications on June 15 through the state's Saral portal. Last year, 94,000 applications were filed for approximately 27,000 reserved seats across the city. This year, the Saral portal received over 1.1 lakh applications by the June 28 deadline, a 17 percent jump, even as parents report the portal crashed repeatedly in the final 48 hours. For a family in Govandi or Mankhurd, where the nearest English-medium school can be four kilometres away and auto fares add up, the digital lottery is not an abstraction. It is a consequential number.

What Schools Are Actually Charging

The NEP's foundational stage, covering children aged three to eight, requires schools to integrate anganwadi-equivalent pre-primary learning. In practice, this has pushed Mumbai's private schools to add a "pre-primary transition fee" that did not exist before 2023. A survey of 40 private schools in the western suburbs conducted by the non-profit Aarambh Education Trust in May 2026 found that 28 of them are charging between ₹8,500 and ₹22,000 for this new preparatory level, a charge that falls outside the fee regulation caps set by the Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Regulation of Fee) Act, 2011. The state's fee regulator, the School Fee Regulatory Authority, has received 340 formal complaints since January 1, according to figures shared at a parent forum in Bandra West last month.

Municipal schools run by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation tell a different story. The BMC operates 1,066 schools enrolling roughly 3.2 lakh students. NEP implementation in BMC schools is being handled through the Aarambh initiative under the Municipal Commissioner's office, which has trained approximately 4,800 teachers in the new pedagogical framework since August 2024. But infrastructure is lagging badly. Only 312 BMC schools have the "play-based learning corners" mandated for the foundational stage. The rest are running classrooms that look identical to what they were in 2019.

The Numbers Parents Need Before August

For schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education, there are 183 CBSE schools within Mumbai's municipal limits, the academic calendar shifts under NEP mean that the old class structure of LKG, UKG, Class 1 has been formally replaced with a five-year foundational stage. Dadar's Balmohan Vidyamandir and schools along Linking Road in Bandra are among those that circulated revised fee schedules in March. Several have not. Parents attempting to compare costs across schools are working without a standardised disclosure format.

The Maharashtra government's School Education Department has promised a unified fee-and-admission dashboard on the Maha Shaala Siddhi platform by September 2026. That date lands after most schools have already collected admission deposits, which typically run between ₹5,000 and ₹15,000 and are rarely refunded. Advocacy groups including Aarambh and the Mumbai Parents Association are pressing the state to mandate real-time fee disclosure on the platform before the dashboard goes live. Without it, families navigating admissions for the 2026-27 year are comparing schools using last year's brochures and WhatsApp forwards, neither of which the state endorses or verifies.

Parents should check three specific things before signing any admission form: whether their school has filed its NEP compliance certificate with the district education officer, whether any new fees are itemised separately from the tuition fee regulated under the 2011 Act, and whether the institution is listed on the updated Saral portal database, which the state is supposed to refresh by July 15. That refresh, officials say, will show which schools have vacancies remaining. Given the portal's recent track record, downloading the PDF version the moment it goes live is the safer bet.