High Court frees college fee structure

HYDERABAD: The High Court on Saturday scrapped the management quota of seats in professional colleges and set aside the uniform fee structure in force now. Professional colleges will henceforth be allowed to charge tuition fees as befits their facilities and standards.While the management quota has been done away with, college managements have been given the freedom to sell 15 per cent of their seats to NRI students -- if possible at a premium. The premium thus extracted is to be invested in the development of the college.A bench of justices G Raghuram and P Durga Prasad faulted the method currently being followed as per stipulations of the Admissions and Fee Regulatory Committee (AFRC). It issued a series of directives on the procedure to be followed in future.The bench ruled in particular that cross-subsidising of one category of students by another was not permissible. It quashed as invalid various orders of the government issued in August 2010 and 2011, and called for a fresh consideration of the fee structure. Henceforth, colleges would have to issue their admission notifications in December and notify their fee structure by March. Recommendations prepared and those given by AFRC to the government shall be placed in public domain, justice Raghuram said.Dealing with the provisions of the Capitation Fees Act, the bench made it clear that the government cannot by itself fix the fee structure as that would impermissibly encroach upon the operational autonomy of self-financing educational institutions.The Consortium of Professional Colleges Managements welcomed the verdict. Speaking to reporters, its general secretary K V K Rao said they had challenged the fee structure decided by AFRC as they wanted a different fee structure for each college and for each course in tune with the standards of the college concerned including lab, placements, faculty and infrastructure. Given this verdict, each course in each college will have a different tuition fee which would be decided by the government by March end.AP State Council of Higher Education chairman P Jayaprakash Rao told Express that the government would have to examine the fine print of the verdict before responding on it.