Supreme Court: The 3-judge bench of Ashok Bhushan, R. Subhash Reddy and MR Shah, JJ has dismissed an appeal against the Allahabad High Court order refusing to interfere in the matter relating to the regulation of fees structure in Universities and Central Institutions
The plea filed by a law student pursuing LLM at Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur seeking issuance of directions to the Ministry of Education and University Grant Commission for framing guidelines to regulate the fees structure considering the lack of unanimity in structuring fees resulting into institutions charging full fees even for online classes.
The petition states,
“the tuition fee which will be charged by the institution amid online semester is not arbitrary but the other miscellaneous fee charged is indeed arbitrary.”
The petition highlighted that IIT Kharagpur issued the official notification to its students for starting the online semester tentatively from the last week of August and uploaded the full fees for its students in their institute’s login id and had instructed it to be paid before 27th July 2020. The impugned notification demands all the requisite fees charged against all other facilities which are provided viz. electricity, computer, library, Wi-Fi/ internet, laboratory, mess etc which are in no manner going to be utilized by the student during this period.
The key points highlighted by the petitioner in the petition were:
- the action of the institution by charging more fees without service will be against the principle of rule of law. Every State Action must be informed by reason and it follows that an act uninformed by reason, is arbitrary. Rule of law contemplates governance by laws and not by humour, whims or caprices of the men to whom the governance is entrusted for the time being.
- not providing any substantial guidelines will make the fee issues being unaddressed, resulting in charging more fees than expected, thereby leading to de-registration of students on non-payment of fees.
- parents should not be made to pay for the services which have not been rendered by the schools. All schools, irrespective of whether they offered online classes during lockdown period or not, are only entitled to collect the tuition fee.
- the salary of teaching and non-teaching staff should be paid even during the lockdown. The guidelines to be issued must be in consonance and proportionate with the salary to be paid to teaching staff and non-teaching staff.
The Supreme Court, however, refused to interfere in the matter and dismissed the SLP.
[Saransh Chaturvedi v. Union of India, special leave to appeal (c) no(s).10722/2020, order dated 25.09.2020]