Hyderabad, April 8 --  The Telangana High Court has ruled that a private engineering college cannot withhold a student's original academic certificates to recover pending fees, directing the institution to immediately return the documents to a student who had dropped out of his BTech course.

A single-judge bench of Justice Juvvadi Sridevi, while allowing a writ petition filed by Ch Muralidhar against the Siddhartha Institute of Technology and Sciences in Hyderabad, held that original certificates are the personal and academic property of the student and no institution has the authority to retain them.

"Even assuming that the college has any monetary claim against the petitioner, withholding his original certificates cannot be adopt...