File image of students.
Credit: DH File Photo
Bengaluru: Failure on the part of principals of state-run polytechnics and engineering colleges to recover the tuition fees from students’ scholarships – credited to their accounts through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) – has left these technical institutions with a cumulative loss close to Rs 4 crore.
Alerted to this lapse by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s office, the Department of Technical Education has issued notice to principals of polytechnic and engineering colleges. The institutions in question reportedly accumulated these losses from 2020-21 through 2022-23.
Students exempted from payment of tuition fees to these colleges are also entitled to a scholarship, and principals are responsible for recovering the waived fee from the scholarship.
However, some students who enrolled at colleges in 2020-21 failed to credit the money from their scholarship to the colleges, while others did not even apply for the scholarship, leaving the government with a loss totalling Rs 3.96 crore.
Prior to the 2020-21 academic year, the money allocated towards students’ scholarship was credited to the principals’ accounts, who were responsible for deducting the tuition fee and then transferring the reminder of the money to the students’ accounts.
In its note, the CAG said that recovery of Rs 1.13 crore was practically impossible since most of those students who enrolled at these colleges in 2020-21 had most likely passed out. In its report, the CAG expressed concerns over the principals’ failure to recover the tuition fee impacting overall development of their respective institutions. Of the total sum, the total money that the principals failed to recover from the 2,526 polytechnic students amounted to Rs 75.16 lakh.