Apeejay School v. Dhriti Duggal
Background
Apeejay School, an unaided private school in Haryana, sued students and parents to recover unpaid fee-hike amounts notified for the 2009-10 academic year, after a government order restricting the hike was itself struck down. The trial court decreed recovery in the school's favour but made it subject to the outcome of a review by the Fee and Fund Regulatory Committee (FFRC), a body set up under the Haryana School Education Act and Rules to assess whether a fee hike was justified. The first appellate court affirmed this but added that if the FFRC ruled for the students, the school would have to refund the entire decreed amount; the school's request to limit any refund to only the portion the FFRC actually found excessive was rejected in review. The Punjab and Haryana High Court then went further, ruling that the Act and Rules ousted civil court jurisdiction over fee-hike disputes entirely, and set aside the recovery decrees in second appeal.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that neither the Haryana School Education Act nor its Rules, expressly or impliedly, ousts the jurisdiction of civil courts over fee recovery suits. The High Court was wrong to hold otherwise, so the second appeal orders setting aside the decrees were set aside. On the school's review petition, the Court agreed the first appellate court's refund direction was an error apparent on the face of the record: since students had already been paying the fee minus the disputed hike, any FFRC finding against the school could only require refunding whatever portion of the hike the FFRC actually disallowed, not the entire decreed amount. The Court restored the trial court's decrees, keeping the reduced 6% interest rate set by the appellate court, and noted (without placing it formally on record) that the FFRC's completed audit had in fact found no illegality in the school's fee hike.
Lesson Learnt
A statutory regulatory body created to review a specific issue (like an excessive fee hike) does not automatically strip civil courts of their ordinary jurisdiction to decide related recovery suits, and any relief tied to that body's findings must be scaled to match exactly what the body actually finds wrong, not blown up into a windfall refund of the whole amount in dispute.