Karnataka: Fees impasse

A battle royale is brewing between the Karnataka state government and the Karnataka Private Unaided Engineering Colleges Association (KPUECA) on the issue of tuition fees payable by government quota students admitted into 149 member colleges of KPUECA. The association wants the tuition fees payable by CET (common entrance test) and/or government quota students admitted into private unaided engineering colleges to be raised from Rs.30,000 (agreed upon last year) to Rs.50,000 this year, while the state government wants to maintain the status quo. Several rounds of talks held over the past three weeks between KPUECA represent-atives and higher education minister V.S. Acharya have failed to elicit an agreement.The tuition fee that the government wants us to accept from CET students is much too low. We cannot run colleges with such low fees. The annual cost of providing good quality engineering education ranges between Rs.55,000-1.4 lakh in our member private colleges with some government colleges spending Rs.3.25 lakh per year. Against this we are prepared to accept CET merit students at Rs.50,000 per year. If they (the state government) dont agree to this demand, let them make the Justice B. Padmaraj fee fixation committee report public. We will abide by the tuition fees recommended by the committee, says Panduranga Shetty, president of KUPECA.
For mysterious reasons, the state government has kept the report of the Justice B. Padmaraj committee const-ituted in May last year, under wraps. The committee, whose mandate was to hold discussions separately with each of the 184 private unaided professional colleges in the state and prescribe an appropriate fees structure for every institution, submitted its report to the government on March 7. But with the government refusing to disclose its recommendations, it has become quite obvious that the learned judge hasnt toed the official line and has recommended higher tuition fees for many colleges than the across-the-board Rs.30,000 per year the state government is insisting upon for populist reasons.
Thus far Karnatakas 149 private engineering colleges and 29 medical colleges have been susceptible to government pressure to admit up to 50 percent of their annual intake at fees dictated by the state government to fill up capacity, and cross-subsidise them by charging ‘management quota students Rs.1.25-3.25 lakh. However following gradual liberalisation and deregulation of the economy and with the Supreme Court in several landmark judgements (T.M.A. Pai Foundation (2002), Islamic Academy (2003) and P.A. Inamdar (2005)) having acknowledged the fundamental right of private unaided institutions of professional education to regulate admissions and levy tuition fees subject to their being merit-based and reasonable, private engineering colleges and KUPECA are beginning to resist government arm-twisting on these issues.
This year our demand of Rs.50,000 as the new fee for CET quota engineering seats is way below our actual cost of education provision. Yet the state government refuses to budge from the Rs.30,000 we agreed upon last year. But with faculty expenditure rising in the wake of the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations and inflation running at almost 20 percent, it has become financially unviable for us to run our college if 50 percent of students pay only Rs.30,000 per year against our average cost of Rs.1.25 lakh per student. This year we wont give a single seat under the old fees structure, says a promoter of a private engineering college and KUPECA member.
Meanwhile on April 28-29, 116,000 students across Karnataka wrote CET 2011, of whom only 2 percent can be accommodated into the states ten government engineering colleges. The remainder will have to be accommodated by private colleges by the start of the new academic year in July.
Therefore unless this impasse between the state government and KUPECA over the issue of tuition fees chargeable is broken either by mutual agreement or the courts before the start of the new academic year, students are likely to experience a bad start to the academic year 2011-12.
Swati Roy (Bangalore)