Senator Nelson Renganathan said this was relayed to him after a meeting with 515 headmasters to discuss matters pertaining to Tamil schools last weekend.

Renganathan, who is also the MIC education bureau chief, told FMT they did not want the licence to be lost when a school was closed.

Renganathan said the headmasters wanted to retain the licence in the event another school in an urban area was needed to be built near an existing one that was packed with pupils.

He cited an example of such schools in Subang Jaya and Petaling Jaya where each class was packed with up to 50 pupils. The ideal number should be 30 students in a classroom.

The number of pupils in estate areas, meanwhile, was dwindling due to urbanisation, he said.

“So what we request is to use that licence to relocate to urban areas where new schools are required to cope with the demand,” he said.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim had said Putrajaya should be realistic in its strategy when it came to repairing and expanding Tamil schools, saying that schools with fewer than 15 students should be discontinued.

In February, Malaysia Nanban reported that 135 out of 532 Tamil schools nationwide would be affected by any such move.

Meanwhile, Penang deputy chief minister P Ramasamy urged Putrajaya to form a committee comprising senior civil servants to find ways to strengthen the Tamil school system.

In his statement, Ramasamy said there had been no political will to transfer the school licence or permit to build new schools in urban areas, resulting in the number of Tamil schools dwindling by half from more than 1,000 in the 1970s.

Echoing similar sentiments as Renganathan, Ramasamy said transferring the existing licence to a new school would reduce overcrowding in classrooms in urban areas, a step that would also be better appreciated by the Tamil community.