On Monday, January 4, the Bombay High Court stopped the state school education department from granting final permission to five junior colleges in Mumbai.
As per reports, the division bench of chief justice Dipankar Datta and justice Girish Kulkarni also restrained the department from acting on provisional index number granted to the trust by Maharashtra State Board for Secondary and Higher Secondary Education.
According to a report in Hindustan Times, the order came after an interim application was filed by Manju Jaiswal, a city resident and trustee of an educational trust, seeking a stay to an order passed by state school education minister Varsha Gaikwad on December 18, 2020, granting Rao Educational Trust time till the academic year 2021-2022 to comply with the infrastructural requirements of the junior colleges.
Moreover, the education minister had also asked the authorities to take adequate measures to grant index number to the trust in order to enable about 672 Class 12 students to fill forms for the board examination. Accordingly, a provisional index number was granted for five junior colleges run by the trust at Andheri, Borivli, Sion, Kharghar and Thane.
However, Manju Jaiswal had taken strong objection to the order and filed the interim application seeking a stay on it. Her advocate Anil Sakhare, pointed out that the education minister had no authority under the Maharashtra Self Finance Schools (Establishment and Regulation) Act, 2012, to pass such an order.
Back in November 2020, the Bombay High Court altered the 28 January order as it permitted the government to consider 410 applications of existing schools either for additional divisions in junior colleges or for starting new junior colleges, after the state assured that the applications will be considered strictly in accordance with the Maharashtra Self Finance School (Establishment and Regulation) Rules, 2020.
Share
Tweet
