Nursery admissions in the capital's schools will start from January 1, 2011, education minister Arvinder Singh Lovely said on Monday. The process will continue for three months before ending on 31st March.

After meeting with the heads of the private schools association Lovely said the associations have been asked to come up with suggestions on admission process, if any, before Thursday.

The Delhi government, which has not yet notified schools regarding the admission guidelines, will come up with it soon.

The guidelines that have been recently issued by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) on the Right to Education for admissions in schools for the academic session 2011-12 had resulted in confusion among schools and parents.

According to these guidelines no school will be allowed to profile students based on their parents' education. It also allows the schools to have certain categorisations that the government feels are just and rational, for example, alumni and sibling.

However, the ministry has also said in its guidelines that the schools would not be allowed to conduct interviews of either students or their parents, which makes the whole admission procedure on a completely random basis through a kind of draw.

This left many parents worried. Hena Nagpal, a mother of four year old, says random selection is not fair at all. “If schools will go with the random selection procedure, there is the possibility of increase in number of applications per school. And each school has a different philosophy and what if my child lands up in a school which does not meet my criteria.”

Earlier, the admission procedure used by schools for admission had made use of the points system that had been recommended by the Ganguly Committee for nursery admissions. In this system, points were allotted to prospective nursery students based on categories such as neighborhood, alumni, sibling, girl-child and first-born child.