When The Supreme Court Speaks in Two Voices 

When a student pays fees, buys a prospectus, relies on an institution’s promises, and loses years because those promises were false, is that merely an academic misfortune or a consumer wrong? When a university conducts examinations, awards degrees, or enforces statutory rules, is it performing a public function beyond consumer law? When the Supreme Court says “yes” in one line of cases and “no” in another, what exactly is the law? And when the law oscillates like this, is the problem judicial subjectivity, doctrinal confusion, or both? 

The controversy over whether educational institutions fall within the Consumer Protection Act is one of those Indian legal questions that looks narrow on paper but is enormous in consequence. It determines whether a student can approach consumer fora for misleading advertisements, non-recognition, fee disputes, deficient facilities, or failed academic promises—or whether such grievances must be pushed into writs, civil suits, regulatory complaints, or sector-specific remedies. The uncertainty is real enough that the Supreme Court itself, in October 2020, admitted an appeal in Manu Solanki v. Vinayaka Mission University specifically because there were “divergent views” of the Court on whether educational institutions or universities are subject to the Consumer Protection Act, 1986. Official records I found also show that the matter was still in the pipeline at the directions stage in February 2025.

The first voice of the Court treated education, at least in certain circumstances, as a service for consideration. The clearest illustration is Buddhist Mission Dental College & Hospital v. Bhupesh Khurana (2009). There, students had been induced to join a dental college on the strength of representations about affiliation and recognition. The Court upheld the consumer forum’s approach, endorsed the view that imparting education for consideration falls within “service,” and held that the institution’s misrepresentation and lack of recognition amounted to deficiency in service and unfair trade practice. The facts were not minor procedural lapses; they involved false claims about affiliation, missing recognition, and the ruining of students’ academic careers. 

That pro-consumer position did not remain buried in 2009. In P. Sreenivasulu v. P.J. Alexander (2015), another two-judge bench of the Supreme Court explicitly relied on Buddhist Mission Dental College and held that an educational institution would come within the purview of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986. The Court set aside the National Commission’s contrary approach and held that the complaint before the State Commission was maintainable. That was not an implication. That was a direct statement. 

But the Court’s second voice moved in exactly the opposite direction. In Bihar School Examination Board v. Suresh Prasad Sinha (2009), the Court held that a statutory examination board performing functions such as conducting examinations, evaluating scripts, declaring results, and issuing certificates is discharging a non-commercial statutory function; therefore, the board is not a service provider and the examinee is not a consumer. This reasoning was carried into Maharshi Dayanand University v. Surjeet Kaur (2010), where the Court held that the student was neither a consumer nor the university a service provider, and that consumer fora could not direct the university to act contrary to its academic rules. 

Then came P.T. Koshy v. Ellen Charitable Trust (2012), where the Supreme Court—again in strong language—said that education is not a commodity, educational institutions are not providing any kind of service, and therefore in matters of admission and fees there can be no question of deficiency in service before consumer fora. That position was later followed again in Anupama College of Engineering v. Gulshan Kumar (2017), where the Court said that in view of Maharshi Dayanand University and P.T. Koshy, educational institutions are not service providers for the purposes of the Act. Later decisions and consumer-forum practice have largely leaned on this exclusionary line. 

So where exactly is the conflict? It lies in judicial characterization. One line of cases characterizes the student-institution relationship as a fee-backed transactional relationship, especially where there is advertising, admission, misrepresentation, and failure to deliver what was promised. Under that lens, the institution looks like any other provider who took consideration and failed to perform. The other line characterizes education as a non-commercial, regulatory, academic, or statutory activity in which consumer law is a bad fit. Under that lens, academic evaluation, degree-conferral, compliance with university rules, and examination processes are not market services at all. 

That is why the conflict cannot be reduced to a simplistic slogan such as “the Court was subjective.” The better answer is sharper. Yes, there is a subjective element—but it is not mere whim. It is subjectivity in legal framing. Judges were foregrounding different features of different disputes. In Buddhist Mission Dental College, the Court saw misrepresentation, false affiliation claims, lost academic years, and an institution that had effectively sold a defective educational promise. In Bihar School Examination Board and Surjeet Kaur, the Court saw statutory or rule-bound academic functions where the grievance was entangled with regulatory authority and academic governance. Different facts produced different legal characterizations. The trouble began when those fact-bound holdings were converted into broad, almost absolute propositions. 

There is another structural reason for the conflict: the Court did not harmonize the categories with doctrinal precision. The exclusionary line often relied on broad propositions such as “education is not a commodity,” but that phrase does not answer every case. A recognized university enforcing examination rules is one thing. An unrecognized college making false claims in advertisements, collecting fees, and destroying students’ prospects is another. A statutory board evaluating answer scripts is different from a private institution marketing a course with promised facilities, accreditation, placement support, hostel, transport, and lab access. The law should have drawn these distinctions expressly. It usually did not. 

A further problem is precedential form. Some of the exclusionary cases, especially P.T. Koshy, are brief orders stated in categorical terms. Meanwhile, Buddhist Mission Dental College and Surjeet Kaur are reasoned decisions grounded in very different factual universes. When short orders lay down broad rules and later benches selectively invoke them, doctrinal turbulence is almost guaranteed. The Supreme Court itself acknowledged this institutional problem in Manu Solanki when it admitted the appeal precisely because of the Court’s own divergent views. 

This is why the real issue is not merely “subjective interpretation by judges” in a casual sense. The deeper issue is selective interpretive emphasis without a stable functional test. Indian courts have sometimes asked, “Is this education?” when the better question would have been, “What kind of educational activity is this?” Is it a statutory academic function? A regulatory or examination function? A fee-for-service promise? A deceptive commercial representation? A private coaching arrangement? A hostel, transport, or facility claim collateral to pedagogy? Without that finer taxonomy, one broad sentence from one case starts swallowing the careful nuance of another. 

The examples make the problem painfully obvious. If a university refuses a degree because the student violated valid academic rules, consumer fora are a poor institutional fit; such disputes often require judicial review or academic-regulatory scrutiny, not consumer adjudication. That was essentially the logic of Surjeet Kaur. But if a college advertises recognition it never had, charges fees on that basis, and leaves students stranded, calling the student “not a consumer” begins to sound less like jurisprudence and more like immunity. That was the moral force of Buddhist Mission Dental College and later P. Sreenivasulu. 

The modern education market makes the old binary even weaker. Today’s educational ecosystem is full of glossy brochures, digital admissions, fee packages, transportation, hostels, industry tie-ups, placement claims, simulation labs, international collaborations, and accreditation branding. To pretend that every educational transaction is somehow beyond consumer law simply because the word “education” is involved is analytically lazy. At the same time, to drag core academic judgment—syllabus design, grading, eligibility, examination standards, degree norms—into consumer fora is equally unsound. That is precisely why the law needs differentiation, not slogans. The later NCDRC larger bench in Manu Solanki moved toward an exclusionary approach for institutions rendering education, while carving out coaching centers differently; that itself shows that even adjudicatory bodies have recognized the need to distinguish categories rather than chant one formula forever. 

In my view, the soundest way forward for the Supreme Court is neither total inclusion nor total exclusion. A larger bench should adopt a functional test. Core academic and statutory functions—conduct of examinations, evaluation, award of degrees, enforcement of eligibility rules, and other functions inseparably tied to academic autonomy—should generally remain outside consumer jurisdiction. But commercial, representational, and infrastructure-linked failures—false accreditation claims, deceptive advertisements, collection of fees for non-existent facilities, fraudulent admission promises, and clearly market-facing ancillary services—should remain justiciable under consumer law. That would preserve academic autonomy without turning students into remediless victims. The current all-or-nothing method does neither justice nor logic. 

So, is the conflict because of subjective analysis or subjective interpretation? The honest answer is: partly, yes—but not in the crude sense of personal inconsistency alone. It is a product of subjective judicial characterization, unequal emphasis on different facts, insufficient doctrinal compartmentalization, and the absence of a binding larger-bench reconciliation for years. In plain English, the Court kept changing the lens without first fixing the frame. One bench looked at the classroom. Another looked at the statute. A third looked at the advertisement. A fourth looked at academic autonomy. The student, meanwhile, was left asking the most basic question of all: where exactly is the remedy? 

Final Thoughts: A Law That ‘Cannot Decide’ What Education Is

Can a legal system speak of student welfare and yet deny a consumer remedy where fees were taken on false promises? Can it protect academic autonomy without creating institutional impunity? Can it keep calling education “not a commodity” even when institutions market it with the sophistication of private industry? And can the Supreme Court allow this ambiguity to persist when it has already acknowledged that its own views are divergent? 

Until a larger bench draws a principled line between academic sovereignty and commercial accountability, this branch of law will remain what it has been for too long: intellectually unstable, practically confusing, and deeply unfair to those who can least afford uncertainty.