STAFF REPORTER: The court ordered the educational institutions involved in this public interest litigation (PIL) to send each defaulting guardian a notification stating the outstanding fees as of March 2020 within a week.
The Calcutta High Court on Friday (August 6, 2021) ordered that defaulting parents pay at least half of their students’ due school fees within three weeks, failing which it will consider allowing the institutes involved in the litigation to take punitive action, such as removing the students’ names from the school’s roll.
The court also stated that for pupils who have passed their board exams for grades 10 and 12, “a direction is to be made to the individual boards to postpone” their qualifications and certificates until school fees are paid.
A division bench comprising Justices I P Mukerji and Moushumi Bhattacharya expressed displeasure with a section of financially stable parents who admitted to taking advantage of the current pandemic situation to not pay their wards’ fees on time. They ordered that the parents pay at least half of the dues within three weeks.
The court ordered the educational institutions involved in this public interest litigation (PIL) to send each defaulting guardian a notification stating the outstanding fees as of March 2020 within a week. The petitioners requested that the order be applied to all pupils in West Bengal schools for the fiscal year 2021-22.
“We are disappointed and annoyed to find that, despite the fact that the economic situation is much better now than it was in 2020, most people have learned to adjust their lifestyles to the current Covid-19 pandemic, a significant number of parents and guardians of students from various schools and other teaching institutions have taken advantage of this order by refusing to pay school fees at all,” the bench said in its Friday judgment.
The bench noted that educational institutions are having a difficult time staying afloat, and that there is a need to balance the needs of schools and students at this time. The court stated, “We believe that the innocent students should not be made to suffer because of their misguided parents and guardians.”
