Visit social welfare dept: HC to Sunil Mishra

NAGPUR: The Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court on Wednesday came to the rescue of Central India Institute of Mass Communication's (CIIMC) 49 students, who were denied scholarships by the state social welfare department.

A division bench comprising justices Bhushan Dharmadhikari and Arun Upadhye asked their director Sunil Mishra to personally visit the department's office in Civil Lines to remove all deficiencies to pave way for the students to get their scholarship money. He was told to meet the assistant commissioner in the morning and sort out all the issues by end of the day.

The court's directives came while hearing an application made by the aggrieved students through counsel Bhanudas Kulkarni contending that the government failed to clear their dues despite many requests and genuine claims. The bench was hearing a PIL by Umesh Borkar against the department for its failure to probe the alleged scholarship scam at CIIMC.

Earlier, Mishra blamed the department officials for unnecessarily delaying the issue. He said that ten students were granted scholarships, whose documents were found to be proper by the department, but rejected applications of 49 others.

Additional government pleader Ketki Joshi countered him stating that the department officials called him twice to the office to remove deficiencies in the documents and sort out the issue, but Mishra failed to respond. She informed that some of CIIMC's courses are unrecognized by the Nagpur University.

The PIL pointed out that Social Welfare Department failed to recover dues of Rs59.26 lakhs collected by CIIMC for backward class students. On Monday, he was told to deposit Rs15,000 after he expressed inability to pay such a big amount.

According to the petitioner, CIIMC started nine new courses from 2013-14 session and NU Management Council fixed its fees which was comparable with other colleges offering similar courses. Mishra then applied for the hiking the fees and NU had granted an interim relief to him through the letter of ex-registrar Ashok Gomashe.

Justice Rohee panel came out with shocking findings where it was clearly seen that CIIMC collected more than double fees as prescribed by NU for the said courses, which was much more than charged for the professional courses like engineering.