The senior Congress leader and former secretary of All India Congress Committee (AICC), Prakash Joshi, has said that refusal of the private Ayurveda colleges to comply with the Uttarakhand High Court (HC) orders on refund of excess fee charged to the students and the failure of the State Government to enforce the orders of the HC prove that constitutional crisis prevails in the State.
He also accused the Uttarakhand Government for protecting the interests of the education mafia which is gripping the educational scenario of Dehradun.
The Congress leader was addressing the media persons at Rajiv Bhawan on Monday. He claimed that the State Government is dithering to enforce successive orders of the court because the owners of colleges include influential and powerful personalities like Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, AYUSH Minister of Uttarakhand Harak Singh Rawat and Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev (Joshi called Ramdev Lala- businessman- instead of Baba).
He said that these private colleges which have formed an association don’t confer to the norms of the affiliation and are not paying any heed to the repeated orders of the University to refund the fee of the students.
Joshi added that these colleges are charging fees in cash in gross violation of all norms and are now threatening students for participating in the agitation.
He said that the State Government should act without any further delay and ensure that theses colleges refund the fee to the students failing which the Congress party would hit the streets. “We would be reaching out to every college student of the State and inform them about the situation.
The party would also start a State wide agitation in support of the students,’’ he said.
The Uttarakhand Government in the year 2015 had released a Government Order (GO) for increase in fees of the private Ayurveda Colleges of the State.
This GO was issue without necessary recommendation of the fee fixation committee and was implemented from back date in gross violation of all norms. On the orders of Supreme Court (SC), a fee fixation committee decides on the fee structure of private colleges.
On July 2018, the HC cancelled the GO and directed that the increased fee should be refunded within 15 days.
The private colleges challenged this order but on October 9, 2018, a bench of HC upheld the earlier decision of single bench.
In pursuance of the HC order, the State Government passed the orders for fee refund but the administrators of these colleges are not following the order.