The Supreme Court on Friday refused to stay the Kerala High Court’s order directing the State not to remit a portion of the fee fixed for Non-Resident Indian quota seats to a corpus fund for providing scholarship/ financial assistance to students falling in the Below Poverty Line (BPL) category in Self Financing Institutions offering MBBS Course.
The bench comprising Justices L. Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and Ajay Rastogi was hearing an appeal filed by the State of Kerala against the High Court order which had quashed the Government order.
A batch of petitions were filed before the HC of Kerala against order relating to fixation of fee by the Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee constituted in terms of the Kerala Medical Education Act, 2017 in respect of Self Financing Institutions offering MBBS Course.
Petitions were also filed by students, who wanted to get admission in the NRI quota. The Institutions alleged that the fee had been fixed arbitrarily without any concern for the actual costs involved while the students allege that the fee has been fixed at a very high rate.
In all the writ petitions, a challenge was made to the direction issued by the Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee constituted in terms of the act to remit a portion of the fee fixed for NRI quota seats to a corpus fund for providing scholarship/ financial assistance to students falling in the BPL category. While the Institutions claimed that the amount must be released to them, the students claimed a refund of the amounts to the extent that it is directed to be remitted to the Government for the purposes of creating the corpus fund to provide scholarship/ financial assistance, as above.
The High Court quashing the Government order gave the following directions
1. The amounts collected from each NRI student to create a corpus for the benefit of those students belonging to the economically weaker sections of the society shall be transferred to the respective institutions where such NRI category students have been admitted and maintained as a separate account to be utilized only for the benefit of students belonging to the economically weaker sections of society who may be admitted to such institutions on the basis of allotment.
2. It will onto the State of Kerala to promulgate suitable legislative measures to achieve the laudable object of providing scholarships to students belonging to economically weaker sections
3.Till such time as suitable legislative measures are adopted by the State of Kerala no further amounts shall be levied or collected from NRI students already admitted or to be admitted to NRI quota seats in this academic year towards the creation or maintenance of a corpus fund for the benefit of economically weaker sections of the society.
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4. The amounts collected from each NRI student to create a corpus for the benefit of those students.