UT education department scrambles to fix govt school payment woes

Chandigarh: The UT education department has directed all local govt schools to set up dedicated helpdesks to assist parents facing technical glitches on the student management information system (SMIS) online fee portal. Instructed during a review meeting on Friday, the designated school staff will directly handle ongoing issues related to failed transactions, registration errors, and payment verification.

Following the inverted pyramid format, director school education Nitish Singla issued a clarification confirming that no late fees are charged for delayed submissions caused by portal failures. Addressing widespread confusion regarding this academic session’s revamped schedule, the department clarified that parents retain the flexibility to pay fees monthly, quarterly, annually, or for multiple months at their convenience.

The immediate administrative intervention follows severe complaints from teachers who warned that the system’s flaws had essentially transformed them into technical troubleshooting agents. Staff highlighted specific operational hurdles where failed payments could not be immediately retried by parents, forcing class in-charges to manually reactivate the transaction process through a separate verification mechanism that significantly increased their workload.

To mitigate these disruptions, the department stated that the portal’s re-verification process has now been streamlined for quicker resolutions, with detailed payment guidelines uploaded to its official website. Furthermore, officials discussed a long-term plan to integrate school fee services with the city’s Sampark platform to permanently stabilise transactions and ease the administrative burden on schools.