Upper, lower fee limits soon for engg courses

The All India Council for Technical Education has kick-started the process to fix minimum and maximum fees for engineering courses, and assigned the task to a committee headed by Justice (Retd) B N Srikrishna.

The move comes two years after the council accepted the recommendations of a 10-member committee - headed by the same judge - on capping the fees for engineering, architecture, information technology, management, pharmacy and nursing courses.

But that committee had prescribed only the maximum fee limits.

Many technical institutions from different states demanded a uniform minimum fee limit, too. They argued that they were struggling to run technical courses as several states had fixed the minimum fee limit in the absence of guidelines from the AICTE, official sources in the council said.

"To address their grievances, the council has decided to fix both minimum and maximum fee limits for all technical institutes. The Srikrishna committee has been asked to make fresh recommendations," a source added.

The fee limits, to be notified on the basis of the panel's recommendations, will also apply to the deemed-to-be-universities that offer technical programmes in various disciplines, the sources said.

The AICTE had formed the Justice Srikrishna committee, asking it to prescribe fee limits so as to check profiteering by private institutions.

The council's move followed the Supreme Court verdict in the TMA Pai Foundation
case.

The committee submitted its report in 2015, prescribing varying maximum fee limits for technical programmes on the basis of factors such as tuition and development fees in tier-1, tier-II and tier-III cities.

AICTE, Page 8