Don't want to bring education system to standstill: HC

The Delhi High Court today directed government's Directorate of Education (DoE) to file a status report on the delay in refunding excess fees taken by unaided private schools while saying "it doesn't want to bring education system to a standstill".
A bench of justices B D Ahmed and Siddharth Mridul also sought a status report from the DoE saying it should spell out the steps taken on the issue.
"We don't want to bring education system to a standstill. The only idea is that schools should not charge excess fee," the bench said.
Advocate Ashok Agarwal, appearing for NGO Social Jurists, said that the DoE has failed to implement the recommendations of the committee and a contempt should be initiated against it.

The court has fixed the matter for further hearing on February 6.
The direction came after the bench was informed that the unaided schools have failed to refund the excess fees as per its earlier order.

Earlier, the seventh report of the Justice Anil Dev Singh Committee for review of school fee, which covers 70 private unaided schools, was submitted before the high court.
The court had earlier asked the government to implement recommendations of a panel on the unaided private schools' fee structure, which had asked 441 institutions to return the "excess amount" to parents with nine per cent interest.

It had also said that the committee has submitted four reports based on examination of fee structures of unaided private schools and questioned why the government has not initiated the process of refunding the excess fee.
Justice Singh Committee, which had made the recommendations, has so far examined the accounts of around 811 unaided private schools out of a total 1,172 institutions.
After the implementation of the 6th Pay Commission report, the schools increased the fees, citing additional financial burden due to increased salaries of teachers.
In August 2011, the court gave directions for setting up a three-member committee to audit the accounts of each of the schools to ascertain if the fee hike was required.

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