SANJU SIMON Vs. STATE OF KERALA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) These writ petitions raise a very pertinent question as regards the propriety of the demand of annual fees from medical students under circumstances where the fee demanded pertains to an academic year different from the academic year in respect of which instructions are being imparted to the students.

(2.) The petitioners in these writ petitions are students who were admitted to the 2019-2020 batch of the MBBS Course offered by various private medical colleges in the State. The fee that can be collected by the said medical colleges, from the students admitted thereto, has been fixed by the Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee constituted in the State of Kerala in terms of the Kerala Medical Education (Regulation and Control of Admission to Private Medical Educational Institutions) Act, 2017 [hereinafter referred to as the '2017 Act']. As per the provisions of the 2017 Act, the committee is expected to determine the fee that can be collected by the private medical educational institutions from the students in the year in which they are admitted to the institution concerned and the institutions are prohibited from collecting any amount in excess of the annual fee so determined, in an academic year. The yearly fee that is determined by the committee cannot also be revised by the educational institution concerned till the student completes his/her course in the institution. In the cases before us, there is no dispute with regard to the annual fee that can be collected from the students by the educational institutions concerned, or with regard to the fact that, the medical course being spread over a period of 54 months (4.5 Years), the students have to pay the annual fee for five academic years. These aspects have been determined by the Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee that is the statutory body vested with the power to determine them and we do not intend to interfere with the said determination.

(3.) The immediate provocation for the writ petitions appears to be the intervention of the pandemic situation in our country, as a result of which, there was a break occasioned in the imparting of instructions to the students in the medical educational institutions concerned. Consequently, the instructions relevant to an academic year could not be completed within the period allotted for the same and spilled over to subsequent months in a calendar year. This resulted in a situation where the students, while pursuing the second year of their course in the educational institutions, were issued with demand notices for the fee in respect of the third year of the course. The said demand notices are impugned in the writ petitions inter alia on the contention that, by demanding fees in respect of a year different from that for which instructions are imparted, the educational institutions concerned are effectively collecting the determined fees in advance and this is not permissible going by the dictum in Islamic Academy of Education and Another v. State of Karnataka and Others - [(2003) 6 SCC 697], and the provisions of Sec. 8(3) of the 2017 Act. The Educational institutions concerned, on the other hand, would justify the demand by arguing that it is the third calendar year since the student was admitted to the institution and, hence, they are entitled to collect the annual fee determined for the third year.