The control and command mindset of Maharashtra’s politicians will take a long while to be eradicated. Thirteen years after a full bench of the Supreme Court in a historic verdict in T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs. Union of India (2002) ruled that private unaided higher education providers have a fundamental right to establish and administer institutions of their choice, evolve their own admission processes subject to merit, and determine their own reasonable tuition fees, on April 21, the BJP state government passed the Maharashtra Unaided Private Professional Education Institutions (Regulation of Admissions and Fees) Act, 2015 through an ordinance.
Under the Act, the state government will determine the tuition fees of every private professional (engineering, medicine, pharma, hotel management etc) education institution on the basis of the recommendation of a panel “set up under a high court judge, with a chartered accountant, a former vice chancellor among others on it,” Maharashtra’s technical education minister Vinod Tawde informed media on April 21. According to Tawde, the Act is applicable to all degree, technical, medical, and agricultural colleges and universities, but not to Central and deemed universities and IITs, and the fees determined by the panel will remain unchanged for four years. Moreover, the Act bars unaided colleges from conducting their own admission exams, i.e regulating their own admissions.
Unsurprisingly, the ordinance — undoubtedly inspired by the judgement of the apex court in the Islamic Academy Case (2003) which diluted the T.M.A. Pai Foundation verdict by decreeing the establishment of admissions regulation and fees monitoring committees under retired high court judges in every state — has aroused the ire of promoters and managements of private unaided colleges. They point out that two years later in 2005, in Inamdar vs. State of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court upheld its ratio decidendi in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case and reiterated that neither the Central nor state governments have the right to appropriate admission quotas, or arbitrarily determine the fees of private professional colleges they haven’t financed or subsidised.
“This Act is patently unconstitutional inasmuch as it flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s elaborate and considered full-bench judgements in the T.M.A. Pai and Inamdar cases. The BJP government in Maharashtra is pushing this invalid Act to win the electoral support of the middle class which has become accustomed to heavily subsidised higher education. The retired judges and so-called experts are old world types who have no idea of the costs of education provision in these days of severe faculty shortages and the mandate of the Sixth Pay Commission to raise the remuneration of lecturers and professors to six digits per month. If the government wants to reduce tuition fees of private colleges, it should multiply the number of its own colleges and drive us out of the business. The state government is disincentivising education entrepreneurs from promoting excellent, globally benchmarked colleges of professional education which is hurting Indian industry and the economy,” says a medical college promoter, who preferred to remain anonymous.
After having secured the autonomy to administer institutions promoted with their own savings following lengthy and sustained litigation in the Supreme Court, private college edupreneurs in Maharashtra are in no mood to cave in to the new diktat of the Maharashtra government. “In several well-considered judgements, the Supreme Court has ruled that colleges which receive no grants from the government have the right to regulate their own admissions, and determine their tuition fees and function autonomously within the guidelines laid down by the apex court. We will definitely contest this ordinance and Act in the courts,” says Dr. Kamal Kadam, president of the state’s Association of Unaided Medical Colleges.
Get set for another lengthy battle in the courts. But this may well be the state government’s strategy to wear down private college managements which have to engage in expensive litigation at their own cost, while the government fights its court battles with taxpayers’ money.
Indrajit Dutta (Mumbai)