Engineering colleges could soon have minimum fee criteria
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has admitted engineering colleges’ demand for setting a minimum fee and also to revise upper fee limit. The AICTE has sent a revised fee structure to the Ministry of Education after accepting the report of the National Fee Committee led by Justice (retd) B N Srikrishna.
It is likely that the minimum fee limit will be set at â‚ą79,000 and upper limit at â‚ą 1.89 lakh.
In 2015, when the fees for undergraduate engineering courses was revised last, the Srikrishna committee, appointed by the Supreme Court, set maximum fee at â‚ą1.44 lakh to â‚ą1.58 lakh per year. The objective of setting up the panel was to put a cap on the tuition fees for engineering and MBA courses.
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Private colleges desperately wanted the AICTE to intervene because in the absence of any regulation on minimum fee, some states like Telangana and Tamil Nadu had put their own minimum fee rules, which the colleges found unfeasible to maintain the huge infrastructure and staff.
The Srikrishna committee report also suggested maximum (₹1.4 lakh per annum) and minimum (₹67,000) fee for diploma in engineering. For a master’s in engineering, the maximum and minimum fee have been proposed at ₹3.03 lakh and ₹1.41 lakh respectively.
The revised fee structure will need approval of the Union Ministry of Education and also from respective state governments.
