After the Supreme Court’s order to hike the tuition fee, the state government came up with two options to reduce its fee reimbursement burden. Of them, it has now decided to stick to the first one which says, from this academic year, the government will reimburse only up to Rs 31,200 towards the tuition fee for each eligible engineering student, even though the colleges are charging substantially more than that and the students will have to bear the excess amount. A committee of experts and a cabinet sub-committee has finalised this decision on Monday
Further, it also decided to implement strict rules to those second, third, and fourth year students by making the scheme available for those who have cleared 50% of all the first year papers.
The committee also announced that a strict verification, affiliation and recognition process will be carried out by a task force comprising of officials from JNTU (Hyderabad, Kakinada, and Ananthapur) and the higher education and revenue departments will inspect the colleges and also verify whether they have the facilities as declared in the records submitted by them to the Supreme court and the Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee (AFRC). Further, this task force will replace AFRC, which was till this year the statutory body for supervising the fee structure at engineering and other professional colleges.
The government also decided not to further delay the engineering counselling. As per the sources the committee will meet on August 8 and announce the counselling dates. The government will decide about the fee structure for each of the 133 engineering colleges which have asked for a fee hike after the inspections have been completed. They added saying that the admission notification might not carry out the revised fee for all the colleges. Further, government also decided to closely watch the admissions of management quota seats, said the sources.
Government assures students of interest-free bank loans
Besides announcing that the government will bear only a part of the tuition fee, it also assured students that it will help students to get interest-free loans from banks. The AFRC has sought three months to revise the fee structure in all the professional colleges. However, it decided to begin the counselling with the old fee structure. In case of fee hike, the students have to bear the additional amount.
Source: TOI and DC
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