A proposal to almost triple the annual fees paid by students of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to Rs 2.5 lakh has emerged from the IIT Council. According to a report in this newspaper, the proposal has been referred to a committee, which will submit a report to the Union ministry of human resource development for it to take a decision on the extent of the fee increase. However, some reports also suggest that the Council, headed by the Union human resources development minister, may have put any decision on hold in view of the coming Bihar Assembly elections. Instead, the council has set up a committee to look for ways to make available more loans to students and maintain and enhance scholarships available to needy students. In this context, it is worth noting that fees paid by students attending the National Institutes of Technology have recently been raised nearly three times, to Rs 2 lakh per year, without much public fuss. There are now quite a few IITs, as many as 18, and three more are coming. With this many around, it is time to be realistic about fees charged by government-funded institutions. Private institutions offering equivalent degrees charge students in the Rs 2-10 lakh range. Even the Rs 2.5 lakh a year proposed for the IITs is still about Rs 1 lakh short of what each student costs the government per annum.
Education, particularly quality higher education, is a great social equaliser and should be made available to all. Nobody qualifying for admission to an IIT should fail to get in because she cannot afford the fees. At the moment, only about half of the IITs' students pay the full fees; those coming from the reserved categories or families with an annual income of less than Rs 4.5 lakh pay only 10 per cent of the prescribed fees. Concessional loans are also an important way of increasing access to tertiary education. As the financial system deepens and spreads, the costs of administering such education loans will decrease. Any future plans to make the IITs self-sustainable in terms of cost should indeed have student loans as a key element, combined with the existing concessional fee rates for the most needy.
It is also true that the IITs should do more to generate their own financial resources. Sponsored projects currently account for only about 24 per cent of their total revenue; their equivalents globally earn 60-80 per cent through this route. Greater attention to these will also impart a more applied, as opposed to fundamental, tone to academic work, and produce engineers who are more job-ready when they graduate. The IITs should also strive to build their endowments, with donations from industry and successful alumni. Well-known Indian business houses and iconic names in business have chosen to sponsor chairs in leading institutions abroad. Certainly, business leaders may have their reasons for doing so; for one, the IITs are still far away from matching the research potential of many Western universities. But, perhaps, the IITs need to become more business-friendly, too; if they did, targeted endowments would surely follow sponsored projects. This needs government action: the human resource development ministry must minimise the overpowering red tape associated with such projects and endowments.
