Apex court to hear lawsuit on Bangalore business school

New Delhi, March 16 (IANS) The Supreme Court Monday slated for final hearing a lawsuit that has sought closure of a Bangalore-based business school, allegedly for duping students after extracting from them huge fees though the school has no affiliation with any university.

In his lawsuit, student Rishabh Jain claimed that the Institute of Chartered Financial Analyst of India (ICFAI) National College, duped him of around Rs.200,000 and made him waste one precious academic year. He sought the institute's closure.

Upgrading Jain's lawsuit, filed way back in 2006, to the stage of final hearing, a bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justice V.S. Sirpurkar and Justice P. Sathasivam asked the registry to slate it for hearing at the earliest.

In his lawsuit, Jain complained that he was tricked into taking admission to the Bangalore-based ICFAI National College in 2004 owing to frequent advertisements by Dehradun-based ICFAI University about its various prestigious courses like Masters in Business Administration (MBA), Masters in Computer Application (MCA), Bachelor in Business Administration etc., at various off-campus colleges spread all over India.

Jain told the court that he took admission in the Bangalore college for a BBA degree course in 2004 after paying Rs.200,000 and successfully completed the first year of the course in 2005.

In 2005, Jain said, he wanted to migrate to another off-campus college of the ICFAI University at Pune. But on applying for migration to the Pune college, he was told that the Bangalore college was not affiliated to the Dehradun-based ICFAI University and its degree was not worth the paper on which it was written.

Jain told the court this led him to enquire from the University Grants Commission about the status of the Bangalore college.

The UGC too said that it was not recognised or affiliated with the ICFAI University, said Jain.

But the UGC merely referred his complaint to the Karnataka government, which too did not initiate any action against the college.

Jain said Dehradun's ICFAI University too turned a blind eye to his plea though the university's prospectus listed the Bangalore college as one of its constituent colleges.