People's Democracy

UNFAIR PRACTICES IN EDUC. INSTITUTIONS

 

Highly Inadequate to Tackle Corrupt Practices

 

Vijender Sharma

 

ALL stakeholders in the institutions of higher education have since long been demanding that a comprehensive enabling legislation should be enacted by the central government in order to bring private general and professional higher educational institutions under social control. This should include regulation of fees and charges levied from students, admissions of students, reservations, course contents, examination, service conditions of the teaching and other employees, and infrastructural facilities.

 

It is to be noted that the draft of the Private Professional Educational Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Fixation of Fee) Bill 2005, which was put on the website by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), was very weak and did not promise to fulfil the objective of social control. The University Grants Commission (UGC) too had come out with a draft regulation in 2007 regarding the “Admission and Fee Structure in Private Aided and Unaided Professional Educational Institutions.” Both these documents were allowed to lapse. The All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) also notified several regulations about technical institutions, including the one in February 2010. The issue of social control still remained.

 

NEW BILL SILENT

ON IMPORTANT ISSUES

According to the statement of objects and reasons of the “Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical Educational Institutions, Medical Educational Institutions and Universities Bill 2010,” there is public concern that technical and medical educational institutions, and universities, should not resort to unfair practices. Such practices include charging capitation fee and demanding donations for admitting students, not issuing receipts in respect of payments made by students, admission to professional programmes of study through non-transparent and questionable admission processes, low quality delivery of education services and false claims of quality of such services through misleading advertisements, engagement of unqualified or ineligible teaching faculty, forcible withholding of certificates and other documents of students.

 

However, all these issues are not included in the body of the bill. It only says no institution, to be covered by the provisions of this bill, will charge admission or other fees more than that published in the prospectus. Every institution will have to issue receipt in writing for all charges. It will also admit students through a transparent process of competitive test or inter se on the basis of merit. The institutions will give detailed information through their websites and printed prospectuses six months in advance in relation to fee and other charges, admission process, number of seats, eligibility criteria, teaching faculty, pay and emoluments payable to teachers and other employees, physical and academic infrastructural facilities, etc.

 

Thus the institutions have to just inform these details. They are not even required to have these in accordance with some statutory norms. Even the rationale of their fee and other charges structure is not required. It is enough to declare fee, howsoever exorbitant it may be compared to the actual cost. Only in case of prospectus, it is stated that its price should not be more than the reasonable cost. It is well known that in private institutions ineligible faculty is appointed and even if the faculty is qualified, the salary paid is far less than that stipulated by the statutory authority. It is known that teachers have to teach in several institutions. However, under the bill, it is enough for the institutions to declare their infrastructure, etc, even if that is of low quality.

 

However, if any institution does anything contrary to the information published in its prospectus, it will be liable to a penalty which may extend to Rs 50 lakh. There is no penalty, however, if an institution has facilities and faculty even far inferior to the statutory requirements but the institution has published them on its website and in its prospectus.

 

The “capitation fee" has been defined as the amount demanded or charged or paid in excess of the fee and other fees payable (on which there is no control) as declared by an institution in its prospectus. No institution can demand or charge, and no person must offer or pay, capitation fee for admission. If an institution contravenes this provision, then the penalty may extend to Rs 50 lakh, but the bill is silent if it is offered by a person. But in order to cover the loss of the extra money they earlier used to charge under the table, institutions may definitely raise their fees exorbitantly and they only need to publish the new fee in the prospectus. However, even if they do not do so, then the penalty amount of Rs 50 lakh would be quite insignificant because, as we all know, the under-the-table transaction in case of just one student may be even more than Rs 20 lakh. This is bound to promote low quality education at exorbitantly high costs to the students. The proposed bill thus threatens to promote commercialisation of education.

 

So far, at the time of admission, many institutions have been keeping the students’ degrees, certificates or documents and refusing to return the documents to the concerned students with a view to inducing or compelling them to pay the fees for the courses they do not intend to pursue in those institutions. According to the bill, however, if a student withdraws from an institution, then the latter cannot refuse to refund to the student a proportion of the deposited fee as has been mentioned in its prospectus. An institution violating this norm will be liable to a penalty which may extend to Rs one lakh only.

 

NO ACTION AGAINST

UNRECOGNISED INSTITUTIONS

Institutions have also been barred from publishing misleading advertisements about their recognition or in respect of their infrastructure or academic facilities, etc. If this provision is violated, the penalty can be up to Rs 50 lakh. But there is no provision of penalty if unrecognised institutions mislead the students. Recently, the UGC issued an advertisement in all major newspapers about the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), warning the aspiring students that it was not a recognised university, did not have the right to confer or grant degrees and therefore it could not award an MBA, BBA or BCA degree. The website of the AICTE has a list of more than a hundred institutions which are unrecognised and action against them could be taken as per the UGC and AICTE norms. But no action has been taken so far except issuance of warning to the students that their programmes are unrecognised. This being the case, all these proposals regarding penalties appear to aim only at showing to the people that the government is serious about unfair practices by the institutions of higher education. One can well surmise how far such provisions are actually meant for implementation.

 

Demanding or accepting capitation fee is under the bill a cognisable offence while all other offences are non-cognisable under the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). However, a person (or every person) responsible for the conduct of an institution can go scot-free if it is proved that the offence was committed “without his knowledge” or that he exercised all due diligence to prevent the commission of that offence.

 

The most undemocratic, and the most atrocious, part of the bill is Section 18 that says, “No court shall take cognisance of any offence under this act which is alleged to have been committed by any institution or director, manager, secretary or other officer thereof, except on the complaint in writing of such person authorised by the central government or the state government in that behalf or by such person authorised by the concerned appropriate statutory authority, as may be prescribed.” It means that if a student or a parent is the victim of an unfair practice on the part of an institution, (s)he cannot directly move a lower court, High Court or Supreme Court to get relief. Such a student or parent can approach a court of law only through such “authorised” persons and only after these persons are convinced that an unfair practice has been committed.

 

Thus the provisions of the proposed bill do not promise to regulate the admissions, fees, course contents, examinations, service conditions of teachers and other employees, etc. Larger issues of social justice in and the academic accountability of educational institutions, or of excellence in education, have been totally ignored. It takes away the rights of students and parents to take recourse to a court of law to seek justice. The operation of admission and fee regulatory committees, set up by various state governments including Kerala in accordance with a judgement of the Supreme Court, may possibly be challenged once the central law comes to occupy the field. In short, the bill seems to be highly inadequate to tackle the host of corrupt and unfair practices being adopted by many of our institutions of higher education.

 

This bill is clearly meant to help the predatory elements in higher education in making more and more profits. It is therefore for us to force the government of India to protect education from these predators. For that purpose, let all the stakeholders, viz. students, teachers, non-teaching employees and officers of schools, colleges and universities, youth, parents, people’s science movement, etc, converge in Delhi on the coming December 2, in order to make the rally called by the national forum in defence of education a grand success.