Plea to Gauhati High Court: Why no notification for fee waiver since April?

GUWAHATI: Hearing the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) (41/2020) recently a Division Bench of the Gauhati High Court has asked the Assam government as to why a notification cannot be issued to waive 25 per cent of the charges (fees of school and college students) with effect from April, 2020 since when (March 25) there has been no classes in the State due to the corona-induced lockdown. To this, the State government has sought time. The PIL has been listed for August 19, 2020 for the next hearing.

State government's senior standing counsel D Saikia forwarded a copy of the document dated August 4, 2020 to the Court. It has been mentioned in the document that "vide order dated 22.04.2020, a guideline was issued for every Educational Institution to waive 50% of monthly school/college fees exclusively for the month of April, 2020 for the students studying in any class from pre-primary to Class-XII. Subsequent thereto, however, the benefit was not extended. We have taken particular notice of the last paragraph of document dated 04.08.2020 (supra) wherein it has been stated however, based on the savings accrued from the components like electricity charges, transportation charges, meal charges for hostel and residential schools, maintenance charges of swimming pool, science lab, computer lab etc, charges of security staff (reduced) and charges for helpers (reduced) etc. schools should have waived at least 25% of the charges as theses services have not been provided during the period of lockdown".

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