Supreme Court gave an important decision on the annual fees of private schools

Private School Annual Fee: The court has refused to stay the order of allowing annual fees to private schools.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the Delhi High Court’s order allowing private unaided schools in the national capital to pay annual fees for the period after the lockdown last year. , development charges were allowed to be levied.

The court did not agree with the argument

A bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and Aniruddha Bose did not agree with the contention of Directorate of Education (DOE), Government of Delhi that it has the right to regulate fee collection by unaided private schools and allow fee collection. The order of the High Court should be stayed.

“We are not inclined to stay this,” the bench told senior advocate Vikas Singh, appearing for the Delhi government. Requesting a stay on the order, Singh said “it will affect lakhs of parents”.

However, the top court made it clear that the Delhi government can place all these arguments before the division bench of the High Court, as the petition here has not been dismissed on merits.

Hearing on the matter is to be held on July 12

The top court took cognizance of the fact that a division bench of the high court is scheduled to hear the matter on July 12. The court said that the government can put all these arguments there, because here the petition has not been dismissed on the basis of merit.

A single bench of the High Court had on May 31 quashed the April and August 2020 orders issued by the DoE of the Delhi government, which had stayed the collection of annual fee and development fee.

After this, the Directorate of Education filed an appeal in the apex court, saying that if the order is not stayed, there will be a lot of injustice as such institutions have already been allowed by the government to charge 100 per cent tuition fee.

When the hearing began, senior advocates Shyam Diwan and NK Kaul, appearing for the private school organizations, opposed the appeal of the Delhi government.

He said that the single bench of the High Court had taken cognizance of the apex court’s judgment of ‘Indian School, Jodhpur vs State of Rajasthan’ on May 31 which held that schools can charge annual fee with a deduction of 15 per cent and in this case This also applied to me.