Fee reimbursement: Supreme Court raps State government

The Supreme Court on Monday pulled up the State government for circulating a letter seeking extension of time by three months for reimbursement of about Rs. 3,700 crore towards fees to the colleges for the eligible students, whose parental income was less than Rs. one lakh per year.

A Bench of Justice R.V. Raveendran and Justice A.K. Patnaik found fault with the government for circulating such a letter, instead of filing an affidavit in this regard. The Bench refused to grant extension of time but allowed the government to file an affidavit in one week.

Acting on an appeal from the State against the Andhra Pradesh High Court order, the Supreme Court in December last made an interim order that the State should pay 25 per cent of the fee within first four weeks of admission of students; another 25 per cent within 8 weeks thereafter. Further, the State should undertake the verification of the certificates and within four months thereafter, it should pay the remaining 50 per cent of the fee. The court had made it clear that if this interim order was not complied with the interim stay on implementation of the High Court order would automatically stand vacated.

When the case resumed on Monday, the court took serious exception to the letter from the State. Justice Raveendran observed that if the State was not able to implement the popular scheme, it can scrap it. “You can't shift the liability to pay the fees on the students.” The court did not accept the State's contention that the loans would be arranged through banks to colleges instead of fee reimbursement.

The State government had moved the Supreme Court after the Andhra Pradesh High Court upheld the contention of the private professional colleges that the fee of the students should be paid in full at the stage of admissions itself. This led to a widespread agitation among poor students with less than Rs one lakh parental income as they wanted the State to step in to pay the fee under the reimbursement scheme.

The complaint of the petitioner colleges is that the government is not paying the fee for the SC ,ST, BC and EBC students at the beginning of academic year. They said the government had promised to reimburse later and they are finding it difficult to run the institutions at the expected standards.

It must be noted that the engineering colleges managements association had threatened to launch an agitation from Tuesday failing to clear the fee reimbursement dues to the tune of Rs. 3,737 crore. According to them out of the total Rs. 4,037 crore fee reimbursement arrears, the State government had so far paid only Rs. 300 crore.

As per the Supreme Court's directive, the managements were to pay the fee reimbursement money to students before January 29 and their grievance was it was not complied with so far.