BHAKTAPUR: Higher Secondary Education Board today warned Plus Two colleges of cancelling their affiliation or halting the admission process for this year if they did not return the extra fee charged from scholarship awardees this week.

HSEB had issued a public notice on July 29, 2013, in a daily broadsheet to scrap the provision of charging fees from the scholarship awardees.

Before issuing such notice, the Plus Two colleges were allowed to charge Rs 1,000, Rs 650 and Rs 350 per month from a scholarship awardee in the science, management and education and humanities streams.

However, despite the ceiling, the colleges were charging more than Rs 20,000 every year from students in the name of laboratory practicals, especially from science students.

Narayan Koirala, spokesperson for HSEB, today reiterated that action will be taken against such colleges beginning next week if they failed to return money to the students. “If any higher secondary school/Plus Two college defies the order, either admissions in Grade XI will be stopped or their registration will be cancelled,” said Koirala, who is also the coordinator of Code of Conduct Central Monitoring Committee.

A couple of weeks ago, a special monitoring team from the Code of Conduct Central Monitoring Committee had also asked the HSS to return the exorbitant fees collected from students within a week but the colleges failed to do so.

The monitoring team is all set to submit the report to the committee within a couple of days.

Some school principals were found threatening students for asking the college administration to return the extra money or revealing the truth to the monitoring team.

Last year too, around 45 higher secondary schools were monitored by the committee but very few were punished.

This year too, the committee will suggest the HSEB to take action against the faulty colleges, but no such thing will happen, said a member of the committee on condition of anonymity.

He said, “If we act against faulty colleges, our senior officials stop us. Not only that, we receive threats from political parties also.”

source: the himalayan times,7 july 2014