No seriousness on fee revision: Colleges

The Admissions and Fee Regulatory Committee, which regulates fee structure in professional colleges, will begin “fee revision exercise” from July 4. However, the managements of the professional colleges are crying foul over the AFRC’s decision to call management representatives from 40 engineering, MBA and MCA colleges at a time for scrutinising their financial statements. The AFRC’s decision has evoked sharp criticism from managements, who term the exercise as an “eye-wash”.

Based on recent SC orders directing the AFRC to consider fee revision in professional colleges (that are willing to adopt AICTE and state government’s pay scales for faculty and other staff) for the current academic year (2012- 13), nearly 250 colleges submitted fee hike proposals to the AFRC. The engineering colleges have sought fee hike from the existing `31,000 to `50,000 per annum, while some colleges have urged a common fee of `1.5 lakh per year for convenor and management seats.

Although it is more than a month since the fee proposals were submitted, the AFRC has not started the scrutiny of applications.

“The very fact that the AFRC has called 40 colleges at a time per day to scrutinise the applications shows the non-seriousness of the state government in implementing the SC orders. How is it possible to scrutinise applications involving complicated financial issues? It seems this exercise is only an eye-wash and the state government is not serious,” said Nimmaturi Ramesh, general secretary, Consortium of Engineering and Professional Colleges Management Associations.