Students joining the engineering course this year have to brace up for higher fees denting their parents’ pockets. All the top colleges have sought a considerable spike in fee and secured favour from the Telangana Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee (TAFRC).
Though the meetings with college managements are already over to finalise each college’s fee structure, the TAFRC is yet to announce the figures officially. The report has to be sent to the government which issues separate GOs for all the colleges since the fee varies from one college to another.
Sources said that this year, students can expect an average 20% hike while for top colleges it is likely to be enhanced by nearly 30 to 40%. About 7 to 8 colleges are said to be in the fee structure of above ₹1.5 lakh this year, including CBIT, MGIT, CVR College of Engineering, Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology, and a couple of other colleges. The VNR Vignan Jyothi college is said to be going for an appeal as the enhancement is not to their liking.
Officials, on condition of anonymity, said that about 40 colleges have sought a fee of about ₹ 1 lakh per annum and that has been granted. For example, the fee for Marri Laxma Reddy Institute of Technology (MLRIT) has been fixed at ₹1.15 lakh. Similarly, most colleges of Labour Minister Ch. Malla Reddy and his brothers also figure in the same bracket. Though the TAFRC decided to finalise the minimum fee at ₹45,000, some rural colleges have requested the fee to be retained at ₹35,000 fearing they wouldn’t attract many students.
AICTE suggestion
The All Indian Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has suggested the minimum fee to be ₹75,000 but the TAFRC refused to adopt it as not many colleges are implementing the 7th Pay Revision Commission scales and morally, colleges can’t demand the minimum fee to be fixed at ₹75,000.
While private colleges continue to fight for fee enhancement, fee structure in government engineering colleges in Osmania University and JNTU campus college has also been steadily increasing. Till a few years ago, fee at OU Engineering College used to be around ₹10,500 but that has been enhanced to ₹30,000 odd even as it started offering self-financing courses at a much higher fee of ₹1 lakh.
The JNTU campus college at Kukatpally too, charges a fee of ₹75,000 for self-finance seats. From this year it has decided to start two new courses – B. Tech in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and B. Tech in Data Science as part of the Computer Science stream with a fee of ₹1 lakh per year.
The increased fee will also burden the state government as it reimburses fees to all the students who secure ranks below 10,000 in the EAMCET. For the rankers above 10,000, only the minimum prescribed fee is reimbursed and the remaining has to be borne by the students.
The new fee structure will be valid for the next three-year block period from the academic year 2022-23. The last fee revision was done in 2019. Telangana has around 160 engineering colleges (the final figure would be available once the counselling starts) and of these about 15 are under Osmania University, five under Kakatiya University and the remaining under JNTU Hyderabad.
