Justice Juvvadi Sridevi of the High Court passed an interim order permitting private engineering colleges to collect tuition fees directly from students eligible for the fee reimbursement scheme from the academic year 2026-27, if the government failed to reimburse the fees to the colleges. 

Describing the order ‘as an interim measure’, the judge made it clear that the private colleges should refund the tuition fees to the respective students if the writ petitions filed by them were dismissed during the final adjudication. The order was passed after hearing contentions in a batch of 14 writ petitions filed by different private colleges.