Delhi High Court has struck down Jawaharlal Nehru University’s practice of recovering from students the amount paid under the Non-National Eligibility Test (NET) scholarship scheme when they get selected for a higher fellowship.

Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav on May 16 also directed the university to refund the amount retrieved from four students who had filed the petitions.

The judgment could prompt students across central universities to seek refund as all these institutions follow the recovery practice in the absence of any guidelines from the University Grants Commission (UGC).

JNU had asked the four students to refund the amount paid to them under the Non-NET scheme after they were selected for the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) based on their performance in the NET.

Students pursuing MPhil and PhD in central universities are entitled to a monthly Non-NET fellowship of Rs 5,000 and Rs 8,000, respectively.

The amount under the JRF is Rs 31,000 a month and students keep striving for this fellowship by appearing in the NET. Once a student qualifies for the JRF, the university discontinues the Non-NET scholarship. However, at the time of the submission of the thesis, the universities ask the students to refund the amount they received under the Non-NET scholarship before they upgraded to the JRF, even though there is no overlap in payment.

In the present case, a student of the integrated MPhil-PhD programme, whose example the court cited, had received Non-NET fellowship for over two years till December 2018. He became eligible for the JRF from January 2019 to December 2022. He was asked to refund the Rs 3 lakh he had received under the Non-NET scholarship for him to be able to submit his thesis.

The counsel for JNU had argued that the Non-NET fellowship was applicable for a period of five years and a student is not entitled to take up two scholarships within this period. If the petitioner intends to receive the benefits of another scholarship after the Non-NET scholarship, he or she will have to return the amount received under the Non-NET fellowship, JNU contended.

The court said that there was no clause in the official communication related to the Non-NET fellowship to disentitle candidates from availing themselves of the benefits of the scheme in case they become eligible for any other fellowship.

Sunny Dhiman, one of the petitioners, told The Telegraph: “This issue should not be confined to a single university. It is time for the UGC to establish a standard procedure for permanently eliminating this practice so that students in all central universities are paid back the money recovered from them.”