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Notice Issued In PIL Challenging Exorbitant Fees For Competitive Exams : Delhi High Court

Team SoOLEGAL 31 May 2019 5:00pm

Notice Issued In PIL Challenging Exorbitant Fees For Competitive Exams : Delhi High Court

The Delhi High Court issued a notice in a PIL stating "equal opportunity to enter workforce" and regulation of "exorbitant fee" and GST charged for applied for various entrance examination and posts advertised by State and its agencies.

The PIL was filed by Ateet Bansal through Advocate Charu Mathur contending to declare "Right to Access to equal opportunity to enter workforce" as Right to Life within the meaning of Article 21 of the Constitution.

An MBA and engaged in private job from 8 years, the petitioner saw high fee charged as application fee when he wanted to apply for government job and also stated that in many cases, examinations are either cancelled or not conducted without even refunding the application fees.

The petitioner also contended against the GST of 18 per cent payable on various examinations when "education and job creation should be basic part of the good governance to empower nation".

He gave the example of GST charged on IIT exam online registration despite which the examination centers were lacking such basic facilities and there was no place to keep basic objects like car keys, mobiles, handbags.

The petitioner also contended that charging high application fee for entrance examinations is pushing candidates from economically weaker sections of the society out of the race when as per census of 2011-12 total number of poor has increased 363 million from 269 million.

"This raise in the poverty line income bar means 93.7 million more people are now below poverty line (BPL). This means that certainly for BPL families and lower middle class families it's impossible to allow their children to sit for entrance examination or to try their luck at various recruitments due to high application fee".

The petition seeks the court to view commercialization of education and states, "On an average in an entrance year post 12th graduation, if a candidate wishes to secure a good rank in a college of her choice, she has to spend minimum Rs 20,000-30,000 for only applying in various colleges".

The petitioner also cited example of entrance examination application fee for 3 popular streams of Medicine, Engineering, and Law;

"National Testing Agency (NTA) conducts NEET for Medicine(UG), IIT JEE for Engineering and is staking claim to conduct CLAT as well. There could be many other departments in the list. NEET charged Rs 1400 for general category per application in year 2017 and year 2018 thereby collecting Rs 200 crore approximately. IIT JEE application was for Rs 900 and total collection was Rs 90 crore with sale of 9.65 lakh forms. CLAT had a fee of Rs 4000 per application ending up in total collection of Rs 24 crores," the petitioner stated.

The petitioner also highlighted "great discrepancy" in fee charged in medical courses for post-graduation;

"National Board of Examination (NBE) is an autonomous government agency under the ministry of health that conducts the national entrance test for post-graduate medical course. It charges Rs 3,750 from each student (in general and OBC categories) for applying for the test, while institutes like AIIMS charge Rs 1,000 and Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) charges Rs 1,600 per application," the petitioner said.



Tagged: PIL   Delhihighcourt   exorbinantfees   PIL  
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