IIMs may have to explain fee hikes

The Govt will ask IIM directors the rationale behind such steep fee hikes at a meeting some time next month. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 1, 2008, 03:14:42 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Indian Institutes of Management may have to explain to the Human Resource Development Ministry their reasons for substantial fee hikes from the next academic year.

HRD Minister Arjun Singh on Sunday said the government would ask the IIM directors the rationale behind such steep fee hikes at a meeting some time next month. Ministry representatives at the boards of different IIMs had recorded their dissent to the fee hike proposal.

The IIMs, in the last few days, have increased their fees by about 70 per cent to 150 per cent. The two-year MBA course at the IIM-Ahemdabad will now cost about Rs 11.5 lakh from Rs 4 lakh earlier.

However, the premier B-schools have got ample support for their move on the Internet. A blogger at rediff.com, Ankita, justified the fee hike, saying the faculty at the IIMs do not get salary at par with the private sector and in consonance with the salary packages offered to the students they teach. Munish Guru said that the government should not subsidize higher education and restrict itself to improving quality of school education. Ministry officials, however, said that such a steep hike in public funded higher education could send a wrong message to masses that the government is not willing to subsidize higher education.

Although the officials categorically denied that they would intervene on the fee hike issue immediately but said that they would try to convince the IIM directors to opt for gradual and reasonable fee hike.

IIM-K hikes PG course fee

Taking a cue from its sister concerns, the Indian Institute of Management-Kozhikode has decided to revise its fee structure for the two-year post graduate programmes by over a lakh rupees from the coming academic session. “It has been decided to hike the fee to Rs 3 lakh for both the first and second year for the batch joining in June 2008,” IIM-K Director, Prof Krishna Kumar said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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