Hyderabad: The District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission 1, Hyderabad, has ordered Malla Reddy Engineering College to pay Rs 1.10 lakh in compensation for withholding a former student’s original academic certificates and demanding additional fees for their return, a practice the Telangana High Court has explicitly ruled unlawful.
The complainant, identified as Rakesh Varma’s son from Nampally, had enrolled in the B Tech AI and Machine Learning course at the college’s Maisammaguda campus in October 2021, paying Rs 80,000 as first-year tuition. The college retained his Class 10 and Intermediate original certificates at the time of admission, as is standard practice.
After completing the first semester, the student was unable to continue due to severe financial difficulties. When he and his father sought the return of his documents, the college management demanded Rs 80,000 in additional fees before it would release them. Unable to pay, the student lost four academic years while his certificates remained with the institution.
He approached the Consumer Commission in September last year. After receiving the commission’s notice, the college returned the certificates and sought dismissal of the case. The commission, however, proceeded with the matter, noting that the management’s conduct had caused severe mental agony to the student. It directed the college to pay Rs 1 lakh as compensation and Rs 10,000 towards court costs within 45 days, failing which the amount would carry 9 percent interest.
The order comes against a backdrop of judicial censure of the practice. In April this year, the Telangana High Court ruled that original certificates are the personal and academic property of a student and that no institution has the authority to retain them as a means of recovering dues.
A single-judge bench of Justice Juvvadi Sridevi, hearing a case against Siddhartha Institute of Technology and Sciences, had held that even where a college has a legitimate monetary claim against a student, “withholding his original certificates cannot be adopted as a mode of enforcing such a claim.”
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