The court upheld the right of private educational institutions to collect tuition fees during the pandemic, stating government prohibitions exceeded authority and disrupted financial sustainability.

1. Judgment passed by the learned single Judge in Writ Petition (C) No. 1040 of 2020 filed by the Bilaspur Private School Management Association Society, setting aside the impugned orders/circulars dated 01.04.2020 (Annexure P/1) and 22.04.2020 (Annexure P/2) issued by the Director, Public Instructions, preventing the private school managements from collecting the tuition fees and also from taking any action for recovery is put to challenge in all the appeals, except WA No. 15/2021. The learned Single Judge has, however, permitted the private educational institutions to collect only the 'tuition fees' and not any other fees for the current academic session, which has been declared to be the same as that was charged for the previous academic session. WA No. 15/2021 is in fact against the verdict in WP(C) No. 2047/2020 whereby the Writ Petitioners were relegated to move the statutory authority/Government in view of the provisions of the Chhattisgarh Private Schools Fee Regulation Bill 2020 { Chhattisgarh Non Government Schools Fees Regulation Act, 2020 (for short 'the Act, 2020')} for redressal of their grievances. WP(PIL) No. 100/2020 has been filed by an unregistered Association of the parents of the students who are pursuing their studies in the Delhi Public School, Durg, seeking to interdict the steps being pursued to collect the 'tuition fees' till proper fixation of the fees is undertaken by the statutory authority under the Act, 2020.

2. The Appellants in the above appeals (except WA No. 15/2021) were not parties to the writ petition and as such, the said appeals have been filed with a petition seeking for granting leave to file the appeals against the verdict passed by the learned Single Judge. The grievance projected by the Appellants and the Public Interest Litigant is in respect of the tuition fees and such other fees collected by the educational institutions concerned, particulars of which are summarised for easy reference as given below:

3. WA No. 357/2020 is taken as the lead case and the parties and proceedings are referred to as given therein, except where it is separately referred to.

4. The sequence of events reveals that pursuant to the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, the schools were virtually remaining closed from March, 2020 and slowly, by the passage of time, the classes were being taken mostly on the online platform. The educational institutions, as mentioned above are those in the 'unaided private sector' who are not receiving any grant or aid from the Government. They run the establishment on the basis of the fees collected from the students, for paying the salary to the teaching and non- teaching staff, installation of various infrastructure, day to day maintenance and development under different heads. Because of the various reasons, as a consequence of Covid-19 lockdown, the general public was virtually finding it difficult to make both their ends meet and this affected the field of education as well, whereby the parents of the children who were pursuing their studies in the above schools were finding it difficult to pay the fees. At the same time, running of the schools also became difficult for want of cash in flow, due to frequent and repeated defaults from the part of the students in satisfying the fees.
In order to prevent any coercive action by the educational institutions, the 2nd Respondent issued Annexure P/1 circular dated 01.04.2020, whereby the private educational institutions were prohibited from collection of the school fees and directed not to resort to any coerci