Division bench formed for hearing on result card fees

Lahore High Court takes up suo motu case against BISE charging ‘illegal’ dues from students.

LAHORE: Lahore High Court’s (LHC’s) Chief Justice (CJ) Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, on Tuesday, constituted a division bench to proceed with a suo motu case against the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) for charging ‘illegal’ dues from students.

The chief justice also included two identical writ petitions pertaining to fee collection by the board that were already pending before the court.

The BISE’s legal advisor Sheikh Shahid Waheed told the court that two writ petitions on the same matter were already pending before the court.

He said that a notice should be issued to all boards in Punjab so that a policy can be set up and no order is passed without hearing all the petitioners.

The CJ directed the Lahore High Court office to place these petitions along with the suo motu case before the division bench on November 30 and issue notices to all boards in the province. Justice Ijaz-ul-Ahsan will sit on the division bench with the CJ.

On the last date of hearing, Punjab chief secretary had told the court that the Lahore BISE was charging a fee for the issuance of result cards due to some expensive measures adopted to check the tampering of certificates.

The reply further said that all the education boards of the province used to issue result cards for free but after taking the new anti-tampering steps a fee of Rs450 per student had been levied which was not part of the admission fee.

Barrister Zafarullah Khan, on the court’s request, had filed a report on the matter and said that the levy of Rs450 on the issuance of result cards was a violation of the newly inserted Article 25-A of the Constitution which requires the government to provide free education.

He asked the court to set aside all such fees being charged by the board and declare it unconstitutional.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 17^th, 2010.