Delhi High Court allows private schools to hike fees from April 2027
The Delhi High Court observed that “no prior permission or sanction is required by a private, unaided, recognised school to increase its fee at the commencement of an academic session".
The court stated that the DoE's orders “cannot be sustained in law, since such orders have been passed on the basis of a misconceived exercise conducted by the DoE" (File photo) The Delhi High Court on Friday allowed private schools in Delhi to hike their fees from the academic session of April 2027, quashing the orders of the Directorate of Education (DoE) that had rejected the schools’ proposals for a fee hike. The court has allowed the fee hike, as per the last proposed fee hike by each such school, as sent to DoE.
The court, however, made it clear that “no school shall demand or recover from any parent or student any arrears of fee or other charges retrospectively for the past academic sessions.”
Justice Anup Bhambhani has set aside the orders passed by the DoE rejecting schools’ fee-hike proposals by schools at the commencement of an academic session. The judge stated that the DoE’s orders “cannot be sustained in law, since such orders have been passed on the basis of a misconceived exercise conducted by the DoE demanding that the schools must seek prior approval for increasing their fee even at the commencement of an academic session.”
Reaffirming judicial precedents and the existing law, the court observed that “no prior permission or sanction is required by a private, unaided, recognised school to increase its fee at the commencement of an academic session; and the only statutory obligation upon a school is that it must file its statement of proposed fee with the DoE before commencement of an academic session.” Such a DoE nod is only necessitated for a fee hike if the same is done during the ongoing academic year.
Several schools had gone to court challenging the Directorate of Education’s rejection of the schools’ proposals for fee hikes from time to time, arbitrarily and unlawfully. The schools had contended that such refusals impinged on their right to run private, unaided, recognised schools with requisite financial autonomy. They argued that the DoE’s actions have resulted in serious deleterious consequences, leading to stagnation of development and growth of their institutions.
Disposing of a batch of petitions, with some of these petitions dating back to as far as 2017, Justice Anup Bhambhani noted the litigation as “one such instance” where the court had to “merely to re-articulate and reiterate a settled legal position, since one of the parties had obstinately refused to acknowledge and comply with that position.”
“…the sheer recalcitrance on the part of the DoE to comply with the settled position has compelled the schools to approach the court, yet again, since the DoE has persisted in its follies, and has, in a sense, simply refused to accept the law laid-down, not just by Co-ordinate Benches and by a Division Bench of this court, but also more than once by Constitution Benches of the Supreme Court…DoE has precipitated a huge round of litigation only by reason of its plain refusal to obey the law as comprised in the statute, and as authoritatively interpreted by the constitutional courts,” Justice Bhambhani observed in the 120-page order.
While permitting the fee hike in a bid to balance the interests, including those of parents and students, the court observed, “Since the DoE has sat on fee-hike proposals for several years, the petitioner schools have been unable to legitimately increase their fee over several academic sessions, placing some of them in serious financial disarray. If, however, the pending fee-hike proposals, some of which relate back to the year 2016-17, are allowed to be implemented at this stage after lapse of several years, it would put an inordinate and unacceptable burden on the parents/students, who would have to pay arrears of fee for the past several years.”
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