Bhubaneswar, June 3: A Bhubaneswar-based voluntary organisation has filed a writ petition in Orissa High Court alleging that some private state institutions are not following guidelines provided by the Orissa Professional Education Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Fixation of Fee) Act.

Niranjan Choudhry, the secretary of Sankalp, who filed the petition, alleged that despite the enactment of the Orissa act, merit-based non-exploitative professional education in Orissa was a distant dream.

The state act extends to professional, educational institutions within Orissa irrespective of whether they are controlled by the government, the university or a private body. It ensures controlled admission to private and government-controlled professional schools through a joint entrance examination (JEE) conducted by the government followed by centralised counselling.

The act further determines academic fees for colleges in the state by a panel called the Fee Structure Committee.

“It has come to our notice that the industries department has exempted two deemed universities and professional colleges with highest number of seats from the purview of the act, keeping the policy planning body and the fee committee in dark,” Choudhury has written in a letter to the chief minister.

Deliberate, undue favour to the leading private professional schools with the highest number of seats, ignoring the provisions of the act, has “deeply affected” and “disappointed” students aspiring for higher technical education, he has said.

Undue favour to the leading educational institutions is in open violation of a government objective to curb malpractice and collection of capitation fee in professional schools in Orissa, he has maintained in the letter.

The NGO boss has also alleged that a few premier schools, in open defiance of a Supreme Court direction and the provisions of the state act, have held individual entrance tests and counselling for BTech, MCA, MTech and other professional courses.

The advertisements for the same were published in leading dailies and on the Internet — he has added.

He further rued that two deemed universities charged between Rs 1.1 lakh and Rs 1.2 lakh as academic fee per annum, 38 professional colleges in the state providing BTech degrees provided the same course at Rs 32,000 and Rs 50,000 per annum.