Panel suggests Rs 70,000 per annum fee hike for NIT courses

Move aims to shore up finances of 31 elite technical institutes

A four-member government panel has proposed a steep hike in tuition fee up to Rs 70,000 per annum for B Tech, MCA and M Tech students in the National Institutes of Technology (NIT) from the next academic year.

The standing committee of the NIT Council has also recommended bringing uniformity to the fee structure in their under graduate and post graduate programmes offered by 30 elite technical institutes. Now, they vary from one institute to another in the range of Rs 17,000 to Rs 35,000.

The panel, however, did not touch the fee structures for students belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

To encourage students enroll into post graduate studies in science stream at the NITs, the committee has recommended fixing tuition fee for two-year MSc programmes at Rs 15,000 per student per annum.

For the five-year MSc programmes, however, the panel suggested that fee structures may be revised at the level of institutes. It also left it on the respective NITs to take a decision on revising annual tuition fee for their MBA programmes.

The committee underscored the need to attract more students to take up post doctoral studies at the NITs as the institutes face acute shortage of faculties. 

It recommended fixing of fee for PhD programmes at Rs 15,000 per annum till the thesis was submitted by the candidate. The current per annum fee structure for PhD programmes also vary from one institute to another in the range of Rs 5,000 to Rs 17,000.

The recommendations to revise fee structures of under graduate and post graduate programmes at NITs have been made by the committee to help these institutes generate their own resources to meet their expenditure.

The Council of the NITs, scheduled to meet here on Friday, will take a final call on the committee’s recommendations. It was uncertain whether Human Resources Development (HRD) Minister M M Pallam Raju, who is the chairperson of the council, would attend the meeting.

He has been keeping away from office after submitting his resignation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in protest against decision to create Telangana.

“If the minister does not attend the meeting, it can be presided over by the higher education secretary (Ashok Thakur) or any one of the two Ministers of State for HRD (Shashi Tharoor or Jitin Prasada),” a ministry official said

This is not first time that NITs are pitching for a hike in their tuition fee. A recommendation to increase the tuition fee up to Rs 50,000 per annum for B.Tech and MTech programmes for the the academic year 2012-13 had been made by them in 2011. The proposal was,