It is a testament to the changes which can be wrought by an increasingly populist judicial system that a verdict was delivered against private schools charging exorbitant summer fees for the respite of harangued parents across the country. Where private schools all across the four provinces were barred from collecting fee during the two-month summer break and adjust the fee if it's already collected, the active dismissal of the court order by the schools, highlights the institutions increasing allusions to supremacy over the courts and establishment.

It seems that private schools have become a law unto themselves flouting the IHC’s ruling, and adopting coercive behaviour with parents. Where the Private School Association has the right to appeal the Islamabad High Court’s interim order, it certainly has no right to dismiss the order and use underhanded and covert ways to extort money from parents.

It can be argued that the private schools have to bear the administrative expenses, including rent, utility bills, and teachers’ salary during the summer vacation. On such basis the verdict of the court can be countered in the court for a decision in light of the ground and fiscal realities of schools as an enterprise. However, it is only fair that since private schools remained closed for more than two months, they shouldn’t charge tuition fee and other unlisted expenses from students for that period.

The verdict is backed by financially constrained parents everywhere, and with sound reasons that with the summer fee being charged in advance along with increasing tuition fee every year, middle-class families are often unable to pay this exorbitant sum. Many families have pleaded the court that the yearly fee increase be capped at 5% however, when entities like the education minister and secretary that represent the department of education remain mum on the issue, they create a space for other institutions to intervene.

Where the courts have of late adopted a more pragmatic and populist approach in choosing and ruling cases, much to the publics appreciation, the crux of the matter remains that with government departments failing to meet the rightful concerns of ordinary citizens, and the resultant imperiousness of increasingly elitist institutions, the vacuum created by an absentee establishment is quickly being filled up by parallel entities –those which have now garnered enough public acclaim to render the glaring imposition of their over-reach as a mere technicality that can waived for the good of the country.