Panel wants Govt to rein in fee hikes

Not happy with exponential fee hike in IIMs and IIT's, a parliamentary panel has asked the Govt to control the escalating fees, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 18, 2008, 02:37:40 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Not happy with exponential fee hike in IIMs and similar hike proposed in IITs, a parliamentary panel has asked the government to control the escalating fees.

In a report tabled in the Parliament on Thursday, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD said a large majority of students come from poor families and getting admission in elite institutions with such a high fee would be difficult for them.

IIM, Ahmedabad, had increased its fees by about 150 per cent to Rs 11.5 lakh from the next academic year and refused to roll back the hike citing autonomy of the institution. Other IIMs had also substantially increased their fees. The IITs have sought HRD ministry’s approval to double its annual fees.

However, the IIMs have said no student would be denied admission for lack of funds. Such students would be provided loan facility, IIM-A chairman Vijaypat Singhania had said.

The parliamentary panel was also not willing to buy the IIMs’ logic that students from marginalised sections can get loans to pay the high fees. “Such loans may help only a small number of students in elite institutions/sectors that fetch handsome salary.”

The committee also wants the government to increase the number of scholarships for poor students to meet the high cost of education. The ministry had informed the committee that the government was launching a scholarship scheme from the next academic year to cover 2 per cent of boys and 3 per cent of girls in colleges and universities and 82,000 fresh scholars at graduate level. Under the scheme, the government would provide interest subsidy during the moratorium period covering the duration of the professional course plus one year or six months from the date of employment.

The panel was critical of the IIMs’ wanting to hike the fees without waiting for RC Bhargava committee report on IIMs. The HRD ministry had constituted the panel in October 2007 to review the present status of IIMs, their existing courses, organisational and administrative structures, expansion plans, position of corpus funds and per student cost on various courses.

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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