V-C Gade: Committee to look into fee structure of colleges

“The fee structure was decided long back. Since then a lot has changed. There are many developments in terms of infrastructure and modern needs, and the fee structure does not take into account these things. Hence, we need a fee revision to keep up with the modern times,” said a senate member.

The move received opposition from student representatives. “Before taking any kind of policy decision on fee regulation, students should be taken into account,” said Santosh Dhore, student representative.

B G Wagh, representative of principals in the senate, said, “This issue is more serious for colleges that are unaided and affiliated to the University. All professors have to be given salaries as per the sixth pay commission, which amounts to lakhs of rupees. The colleges do not get salary grants. This leads to increased burden to run the colleges which in turn leads to the need to increase fees.”

Sudhakar Jadhavar, another senate member and also the representative of deans, said, “Students, anyway, pay high fees for technical education. There should not be a problem in increasing the fee for traditional courses a bit. Maybe not to the level of fees for technical education, but higher than the current structure.”

Nandkumar Nikam, a senior senate member, said that the fee structure is old and laboratory charges, among other things, have not been revised for years. He said that there has been a huge increase in the cost of laboratory equipment and this needs to be revised to match the current prices.

Milind Wagh, however, raised the “contradictory” nature of the move, saying, “The varsity increased the fee of external students so that more  would prefer the regular course. Now, it is planning to increase the regular students’ fee, too. This is contradictory to its objective of increasing the external fee.”

W N Gade, vice chancellor of the University said, “We will be constituting a committee under senior senate member Dattatrey Balsaraf. It will look into all the aspects of fee revision and talk to all stakeholders before coming up with the solution.”