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The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed Andhra Pradesh Government’s application seeking permission to fix differential fee structure for students of professional colleges in the state during 2012-2013 academic year. A three-judge bench of Justices R.M. Lodha, A.R. Dave and S.J. Mukhopadhyaya, while declining to entertain the state's plea for interim relief, said it would examine the state's main appeal against the state High Court order at a later stage. The state was aggrieved over an AP high court direction that for academic years 2012-13, the Admission and Fee Regulation Committee (AFRC) should consider afresh the fee structure proposals submitted by private educational institutions including a direction to recommend a uniform fee for category `A and category `B students. Under the categorisation, those students admitted under the government quota have to pay a lesser fee as against the management quota students who end up paying a higher fee structure. It also gave liberty to AFRC to recommend a higher fee for the 15 percent NRI category students. Over 200 engineering colleges had sought a hike in tuition fee by seeking a uniform fee structure for both the categories on the ground having a huge financial burden of paying AICTE-recommended salaries to the faculty and government-recommended scales to the non-teaching staff. The high court order had quashed the state government’s decision to have different amounts of fee for convener (government) and management quotas. The colleges approached the court requesting that fee be fixed based on the expenditure incurred by them and the high court had asked AFRC to consider their proposals.

SC dismisses Andhra Govt plea on professional college fee