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HC sets aside 2013 Maha GR on SC-ST-OBC fee reimbursement- 30-May-2020
A full bench of Justices A A Sayed, D S Naidu and P D Naik was hearing a petition filed by 26 students pursuing their engineering under-graduate courses from Shree Vileparle Kelvani Mandal's Dwarkadas J Sanghvi College of Engineering in western Mumbai.
The state government, few years ago, had implemented a policy for fee reimbursement to SC, ST and OBC students pursuing professional courses.
However, on February 27, 2013, the state government issued a Government Resolution by which it restricted the benefit of fee reimbursement to only those SC, ST and OBC students who had taken admission through the CAP.
According to the petition, Sanghvi College, being a linguistic minority college, had its own admission process monitored by a government-appointed committee.
Any student desirous of securing admission to this college will have to first appear for the Common Entrance Test (CET) arranged by the state government and then apply in this college.
These students need not participate in the Common Admission Procedure (CAP) held by the government after the CET.
The students' counsel Birendra Saraf had argued that the government resolution discriminated between students who had secure admission through CAP and those who by-passed the CAP.
The government had opposed the plea and said the decision to restrict benefit of fee reimbursement to students who have by-passed the CAP and secured admissions in professional courses across the state is a policy decision.
"The government's policy objective is to ensure that the fees reimbursement should to go those students who have secured admission through a transparent, well-documented, well-regulated and non-discriminated CAP," government counsel Girish Godbole had argued.
The bench, however, noted the classification of the government introduced through the impugned GR is "arbitrary, artificial and evasive".
"Access to education still depends, among other things, on the student's economic strength. Socially and economically speaking, the weaker the student is, the farther he is from quality education," the court said, and added the present petition concerns the right of a few downtrodden students seeking recompense on their educational expenditure.
The court noted that even students who seek admission in such minority colleges without going for the CAP cannot be denied fee reimbursement as they are drawn from the merit pool of CET.
The court, in its judgment, noted that while no law mandates that the fee of any backward class students must be returned or that they should be paid back their educational expenditure, but it is indeed a welfare decision of the government.
The court noted that the government cannot lay down "arbitrary and capricious standards" for the choice of persons with whom alone it will deal.
"Every action of the government must be informed with reason and should be free from arbitrariness because the government is always a government," the bench said.
The court added the government's policy to reimburse fees of Scheduled Caste students was not merit based.
"It is simply disability based the social disability of caste. Merit is not the distinguishing factor between CAP and non-CAP admissions," the court said.
"Pursuing technical and professional courses with poverty hard on a student's heels is no easy task. As the students from the marginalised sections move up in the educational ladder, their proportionate representation falls. There are more dropouts. One of the reasons for that is the financial constraints those students face," the court said.
The bench set aside the 2013 GR and directed the government to reimburse the petitioner students' education and examination fees.
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