JOIN USThe tuition fee of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is likely to shoot up, with the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry urging the premier technical institutes to recover their operating costs from students.
The ministry has proposed a new financial model of funding under which the Centre will provide funds to IITs to meet expenditure on research, capital assets like laboratory and equipment as well as infrastructure development, while the premier institutes will have to manage their “running expenditure” on their own, collecting the cost from students.
Though a final decision in this regard will be taken at the IIT Council’s upcoming meeting at IIT-Bombay on Tuesday, official sources told Deccan Herald the proposed funding mechanism would get the council’s approval as most of the premier technical institutes do not have any objection to it.
The National Institutes of Technology (NITs) adopted a similar funding model at a meeting in Warrangal on Thursday, becoming the first among centrally-funded technical institutes to have accepted to meet their non-plan expenditures from their own resources.
To help students cope with the burden of increased education costs, however, the ministry said at the NIT council’s meeting that a new scheme for providing 100 per cent loan at zero per cent interest would be rolled out. “This scheme will be available to IIT students, too,” said sources.
Scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students will remain unaffected by the increase in tuition fees as they will continue to avail waiver of fees with the government’s support, added the sources.
NITs and IITs are heading to embrace this new mechanism almost four years after a committee headed by nuclear scientist Anil Kakodkar recommended it. The committee had in 2011 suggested hiking the annual fees to between Rs 2-2.5 lakh per student.
As of now, it is not clear how much the fee will be hiked from the current Rs 90,000 per annum for the IITs’ undergraduate programmes.