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Dr. B.C. Roy Engineering College & Anr. v. The State of West Bengal & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2026 INSC 1120Decided 14 Oct 2026
Civil Appeal No. 13769 of 2026
Justice P.S. Narasimha · Justice Alok Aradhe

Background

Students were admitted in September 2023 to B.Tech courses at a self-financing West Bengal college under a disclosed fee structure. About six weeks later, the state government raised the fee ceiling retrospectively for the same academic year, and the college hiked fees by ~37.5% after the first semester had already begun, seeking to collect the increase from already-admitted students. The Calcutta High Court's Division Bench held the hike could only apply to students admitted after the notification date, not retroactively, and ordered refunds.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court upheld the High Court's conclusion but on different reasoning. It held that fee-fixation for professional courses must balance students' need for cost certainty, colleges' resource needs, and reasonable regulation, and that fees must be notified before admissions begin: mid-course variation is permitted only in genuinely exceptional, unforeseeable circumstances, not as a catch-up for the government's own seven-year delay in revising the fee structure. That institutional delay could not be passed on to already-admitted students.

Lesson Learnt

Once a student is admitted to a professional course under a disclosed fee structure, that fee is locked in for the course's duration: a government or college cannot retroactively raise it mid-course merely because a regulatory revision was delayed.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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