Supreme Court bars mid-term fee hikes in professional courses except in extraordinary circumstances

A view of the Supreme Court of India | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

Much to the relief of families sacrificing their life savings for professional education, the Supreme Court has ruled that students enrolling in professional courses must know their exact expenses from the outset.

“A student entering a four-year or five-year professional programme like medicine or engineering should ordinarily know, at the very threshold, the financial liability that they or their family is undertaking,” a Bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe held.

The court said mid-stream fee hikes were impermissible except under unforeseeable or extraordinary economic conditions or statutory changes.

Fee-fixation committees must function as continuing institutions, capable of anticipating costs, undertaking periodic assessments, and making timely decisions.

Both the All India Council for Technical Education Regulations, 1994, and the National Education Policy, 2020, offer regulatory frameworks that pre-empt arbitrary fee increases by self-financing higher educational institutions while preserving legitimate fiscal space for them, the court added.