M J Antony: Swept under the carpet again

OUT OF COURT

Regulations on admissions and fee structure in private professional colleges are yet to be formulated.

If there is one issue which has consistently craved the attention of the Supreme Court for the past two decades, it is the set of questions relating to admission and fee structure in private professional colleges. Education has become big business, and the old philanthropic aura around it has long vanished. Politicians and influential persons routinely establish and control professional educational institutions. However, the government has failed to pass a uniform law to regulate them. Therefore, the students, parents, managements and state governments regularly flock to the Supreme Court seeking guidance. What they have been getting are only interim orders for the relevant academic year. They have to wait for a final judgment from the Supreme Court or a definitive law on this subject from Parliament.

The tragedy is that neither is coming forth and the wait seems endless. By March every year, petitions regarding admissions, quotas and fee structure accumulate in the high courts and the Supreme Court. Then these courts go on summer vacation. After reassembling, more petitions come. By then, there is very little time for deciding the weighty questions raised in the petitions. Therefore, the interim orders continue for the whole academic year. In recent years, the pattern is to take a copy of the earlier interim orders and pass similar orders. The main issues are kept pending in the courts which are already creaking under arrears and an outdated administrative machinery. Once the academic year is over, the issues are forgotten till the next season.

In one such batch of cases before the Supreme Court, the list of petitions runs into eight pages. They were to be heard last year but the judges have since been dispersed in different benches and the presiding judge has been nominated as the new Chief Justice. He is presently hearing another set of constitution matters. Consequently, the education cases have disappeared from the list of cases to be heard in the near future. So, a decision on the important questions raised in them are not likely to be settled for the next academic year also. Those who aspire for professional education then should be prepared to be caught in the legal tangle created by the management, state governments and court orders.

A glimpse of the chaotic situation can be gathered by reading just three judgements, which cannot be easily unscrambled by a layman. In 2002, an 11-judge bench of the Supreme Court passed certain orders on the admissions, reservation policy and fee structure of various private institutions (TMA Pai Foundation case). There are aided, unaided, minority and non-minority private institutions. Reservation can be on myriad bases, like backwardness of the person, locality, caste or religion. Fee structure also varies according to the merit of the student or whether his parents are non-resident Indians or not. With such a puzzling array of parameters, the 11-judge judgement was bound to be flawed somewhere.

Thus, a five-judge bench was constituted the next year to clarify certain questions left unresolved by the decision of the former bench. This judgement, in The Islamic Academy of Education case, delivered certain clarifictions and guidelines. That said, the judgement also did not settle all the issues. Within two years, a seven-judge bench was set up to further clarify the situation in the case of P A Inamdar. Since this also did not provide answers to the new riddles which came up in the meantime, the Supreme Court has now scheduled for hearing the petitions running into eight pages. As stated earlier, they have disappeared from the court's board for the time being.

Meanwhile, the central government has claimed before the Supreme Court that it has drafted a comprehensive law on the subject and was consulting the state governments periodically. Broadly, the proposed bill seeks to a) fix quota for admissions for management of aided and unaided minority and non-minority educational institutions, b) provide for state-level and central level committees for the fixation of fee, c) provide for a forum to hear appeals against the fixation of fee by the state committees, d) notify common entrance tests for admission, and e) regulate the entry of foreign education providers through the instruments of fixing fee and regulating admissions to ensure quality.

Over the years, some state governments had passed laws of their own. Their validity has also been called in question. Recently, the Kerala high court struck down the key provisions of the state law. The fate of other state laws also hangs in balance with the Supreme Court yet to hear the petitions before it and pass further guidelines. While the judiciary has failed all these years to bring order to the situation, the central government, which has the ultimate responsibility in this matter, is going snail-pace. Thus the flood of litigation has become an annual feature, almost like the deluge that hits the cities every year.