The Hindu : HRD Ministry to rationalise IIMs' fees

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 02, 2004

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National

HRD Ministry to rationalise IIMs' fees

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI JAN. 1. Undeterred by the flak it has drawn for "encroaching upon the autonomy'' of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry — armed with the Supreme Court judgment in the T.M.A. Pai case — is going ahead with its plans to rationalise the fee structure and possibly even return excess money taken from students in the current academic year.

Still to be finalised, the Ministry is likely to take on board the recommendation of the U.R. Rao Committee for Revitalising Technical Education which said, "if India were to encourage technical education as well as the U.S. does, and make such education as affordable as it is for American citizens, fees in technical institutions should also be pegged to 30 per cent of India's per capita income or Rs. 6,000 per year''.

While the court ruling is cited as the premise for recent efforts to rationalise the fee structure, this is not the first time the IIMs have been asked to lower their fees which hovers around Rs. 1.5 lakhs per year. Since mid-2000, the Ministry has been asking the IIMs to rationalise the fee structure as their high fees had resulted in private management institutions putting a prohibitive price tag to their courses.

Lending muscle to the Ministry's move is the fact that the State Fee Committees set up as a follow-up to the Pai judgment found that self-financing institutions offering management courses could make a profit if the annual fee ranged between Rs. 20,000 and Rs. 40,000. Madhya Pradesh has suggested between Rs. 19,500 and Rs. 21,500; Gujarat Rs. 21,000; Jharkhand Rs. 40,200, Andhra Pradesh Rs. 22,000, Karnataka Rs. 20,000 and U.P. Rs. 19,000.

"When States have fixed the higher end of the fees for institutions within their jurisdiction as per the judgment, can the Centre abdicate its responsibility towards students. Also, these fees are for self-financing institutions and include a profit margin. When private institutions can make a profit with such a fee structure, can there be any rationale in State-funded IIMs charging Rs. 1.5 lakh annually,'' said an official.

In fact, last year, the Ministry got the Indian Institutes of Technology to lower their annual M.Tech fees from Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 5,000, and also freeze their corpus at a certain level and pump the remaining amount back into the institutions.

About IIMs' resistance to freeze their corpus at Rs. 25 crore, officials said the Ministry was not interfering but only trying to get them to use what they have in excess. ``Why, they can use it to `subsidise' the fees?''

As for accusations of encroaching upon IIMs' autonomy, the Ministry position is that the Memorandum of Association (MoA) of IIM (Ahmedabad) - on which the MoAs of its siblings are patterned - gives it the upper hand as it states that ``in case, the Central Government is satisfied that the Society/Institute is not functioning properly, the Central Government shall have the power to take over the administration and assets of the Institute...''

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