The law behind your complaint
Four kinds of place. Four rules they hope you never read.
The law that protects you depends on where you studied. Picking the wrong one is the most common reason a real complaint sits for months and nothing happens. Find yours below — the letter this site writes will quote it for you.
School
No donation. No interview. Ever.
No school can take a donation or capitation fee to give your child a seat. No school can test or interview you or your child to decide admission. A school that takes a donation can be fined up to ten times what it took.
Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 · Parliament of India, 2009. Source ↗
College / University
They cannot keep your original certificates.
If you cancel your admission inside the window UGC sets each year, your fee must be refunded. And no college can keep your original certificates or marksheets — not to admit you, not to keep you, and not to let you go.
UGC norms on refund of fees and non-retention of original documents · University Grants Commission, standing public notices, reissued each session. Source ↗
Coaching Institute
Leave midway, get the rest back in 10 days.
If you paid the full fee and leave the course midway, they must refund the fee for the remaining period within 10 days. That includes hostel and mess fees, if you paid them.
Guidelines for Regulation of Coaching Centres, 2024 · Ministry of Education, Government of India, January 2024. Source ↗
ITI / Polytechnic / Skill Centre
Fees in public. Originals in your hand.
An approved institute must publish its fee list, must not charge more than the state fee committee allows, and must not keep your original certificates. Leave inside the notified window and you get your fee back, minus only what the rules let them keep.
AICTE approval norms (polytechnics) and DGT affiliation norms (ITIs) · AICTE, and the Directorate General of Training, Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, revised annually. Source ↗
places graded here have a refund policy that says the exact opposite of the rule above — that once you pay, nothing comes back. That gap is the whole reason this site exists.
Read this before you use it
These are the national rules. Your state has its own fee law on top, and those differ a lot from state to state — so check both. One route is open to everyone, whatever you studied: the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, for poor service and unfair trade practice. Every institution's page says which rule it is being held to.
This is not legal advice. We are not lawyers and we do not represent you. What this site writes is a first draft — read it, fix anything that is not true for you, and take responsibility for it before you send it.
12 institutions are currently graded against these standards. See how the grading works.
Know something students should know?
Your experience could help someone make one of the biggest decisions of their life. Two minutes, no account, no fee — and you leave with a legal notice for the institution and a complaint addressed to the office that handles it.
