File report on refund of excess fee by schools: HC to Delhi

The high court here Friday asked the Delhi government to file a status report on the steps being taken to implement recommendations of a panel on the unaided private schools' fee structure.

The panel, headed by Rajasthan High Court's former chief justice Anil Dev Singh, has asked over 400 educational institutions to return the "excess fees" to parents with nine percent interest.

A division bench of Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Siddharth Mridul asked the city government to file the status report and posted the matter for Feb 6, 2015.

The three-member panel, set up in 2011, has so far examined the accounts of over 800 unaided private schools out of a total 1,172 institutions.

In its seventh interim report, the panel examined 70 private unaided schools and of them it asked 39 schools to refund the "unjustified" fee charged from their students.

After the implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission, these schools increased the fees citing additional financial burden due to increased salaries of teachers.

In August 2011, the court gave directions for setting up the panel to audit the accounts of each of the schools to ascertain if the fee hike by them was required.

The direction came on a petition filed by NGO Social Jurists.

The plea alleged that schools had hiked the fees "unreasonably" but they failed to pay the salaries of the teaching and non-teaching staff as per the pay panel recommendations.