New Delhi: All India Council for Technical Education has sent a ‘Revised Fee Structure’ to the Union Ministry of Education, which also includes a proposal for a ‘Minimum Fee’. After this move of AICTE, it is believed that there will be a change in the limit of the ‘tuition fee’ charged by engineering and technical institutions. This amendment has come after 7 years. Earlier, an expert committee had recommended setting an upper limit on how much institutions can charge as a ‘tuition fee’. But till now the lower limit of ‘tuition fee’ was not fixed.
The AICTE executive committee, headed by Justice (retd) BN Srikrishna, on March 10 approved the report of the National Fee Committee and sent it to the education ministry, which is examining it. The committee has proposed to the education ministry that in the case of undergraduate engineering courses, the annual minimum fee cannot be less than Rs 79,000, while the maximum fee limit has been capped at Rs 1.89 lakh. In its previous report submitted in April 2015, the committee had suggested that the maximum fee for 4-year undergraduate engineering courses be fixed at Rs 1.44 lakh to Rs 1.58 lakh per annum.
Implementation of the revised fee structure of the All India Council for Technical Education will require the approval of the Union Ministry of Education as well as the state governments. Over the years, in the absence of a ‘minimum fee cap’, many private engineering colleges had been applying to AICTE to fix a lower limit on the tuition fee. Private engineering colleges, in their applications to AICTE, had accused the authorities in Tamil Nadu and Telangana of imposing an impractical minimum fee ceiling, saying it creates difficulties in day-to-day functioning.
Following this, the central government had requested the Srikrishna Committee to reconsider the fee structure along with the minimum fee ceiling for engineering courses. In the new recommendations of the Srikrishna Committee, a maximum and minimum fee have been prescribed for engineering (diploma) with a maximum (Rs 1.4 lakh per annum) and minimum (Rs 67,000) fee for applied art and design. In the case of post-graduate engineering courses, the maximum and minimum fee has been proposed to be Rs 3.03 lakh and Rs 1.41 lakh respectively.
Based on the Supreme Court’s direction in the TMA Pai Foundation case, the Srikrishna Committee was set up to lay down guidelines to prevent the commercialization of technical education. The court then ruled that in order to prevent the commercialization of technical education, the fees charged by private institutions should be fixed by the state governments, until the National Level Fee Fixation Committee makes its recommendations. Section 10 of the AICTE Act states that the council may “fix norms and guidelines for the collection of tuition and other fees”.
