Welcome to reason: With an Edu-triangle forming, who is gonna back down now?

I could go my whole life and say, ‘I’m not going to do anything with a love triangle,’ but whenever you have a romance, there has to be some obstacle, and even 
the dumbest romantic comedies have a love triangle or something
- Catherine Hardwicke (b 1955), 
an American film director and screenwriter

A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to a polyamorous relationship between three people, it usually refers to two people who compete against each other for the undivided romantic attention of a single interest (A and B both competing against each other to be the sole lover of C). 

An ‘Edu-triangle’ was functioning for years in the elite educational scene and it was apparently running smoothly until COVID-19 upset the apple-cart. So during the last few months, classes were disrupted with online classes coming to the fore. This threw up the question of whether elite school managements can charge the old school fees in the regime of truncated campus-based classes. The simmering fight on this has come to the surface, now that classes have been restarted on campuses.  

The edu-triangle has teachers demanding their jobs at pre-COVID pay levels, with managements asking for full school fee payments despite the break in on-site teaching, and parents asking for reduction in annual school fee payments. The state education minister and department officials have been acting as arbitrators on the disputed issues. The result is an agreement or rather an order by the education ministry. 

Parents of students studying in schools under the State Board, Central Board of Secondary Education and Indian Certificate of Secondary Education will pay only the tuition fee for 2020-21 at 30% less than the previous year, Primary and Secondary Education Minister S Suresh Kumar said on January 29, 2021.  

This is not the end of the edu-triangle with managements of elite schools set to challenge the State order in courts. Should the teachers take lesser salaries? Should parents go to schools that are within their affordability? Should the elite school managements reduce their expenses by cutting their ‘show’ (window-dressing) expenses? This triangle involving teachers, parents and elite school managements is not likely to go away in a hurry – like COVID-19 which is at the root of this problem.