New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday took up for hearing a petition for scrapping a law that gives the government authority to accord deemed university status on private educational institutions, which hand out students "worthless paper in the name of a degree".

A bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justice V.S. Sirpurkar and Justice Deepak Verma, issuing notice, sought the government's stand on the petition of consumer rights protection activist Jeetendra Narain Singh, challenging the constitutional validity of Section 3 of the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act, 1956.

In his lawsuit, filed through advocate Amit Anand Tiwari, Singh said that Section 3 of the Act confers wide, unguided and absolute power on the executive to recognise an educational institution as "Deemed University".

This provision is contrary to various rulings of the apex court, which has clearly held that a university could be established only through a proper law passed by the Parliament, and the executive could not be given the power to summarily declare any educational institution as deemed university.

"The petition also challenges the manner in which the power has been exercised by the executive authority in recent years," the petitioner said, and added this has triggered a trend of commercialization of education.

"The petitioner is constrained to move to court as the recent trend of commercialization of education in the country has been fueled by the tendency of the executive to confer the status of deemed universities on institutions which have no standards to be recognised as universities," said the petitioner.

"These institutions, which have been recognised as deemed universities, in turn, indulge in conferring degrees by making profit instead of being interested in imparting education to the students enrolled with them," he added.

"This leaves the innocent student receiving a piece of worthless paper in name of a degree by a body which was not able to educate him in the first place," the petitioner stressed. IANS