New Delhi: After hiking the course fee for their undergraduate courses, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are seeking to hike their postgraduate course fee by six times.

In a proposal, the IITs have underlined that though they spend some Rs10,400 per student per month or over Rs1.24 lakh per annum, they only “charge Rs20,000 per annum" from each student, as per the agenda document of the IIT council meeting.

IITs want student fee to be hiked to reduce their financial burden at a time when the government is pushing for more revenue generation at these elite institutions.

All the 23 IITs, their board chairmen who are largely industry leaders and top officials from the human resource development (HRD) ministry will take up the matter and try to take a call on this by this evening in Mumbai.

With the number of post-graduate students increasing in the IITs, these engineering schools feel that it’s time to hike the fee for post-graduate students to maintain quality and provide good facilities.

The move comes a year after the IIT council headed by human resource development minister last year increased the course fee from Rs90,000 to Rs2 lakh per annum for undergraduate IIT students.

While allowing the fee hike, the government then (April 2016) had convinced the IITs to waive, in full, the annual fees for students from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe and differently-abled categories. Besides, students from families with an annual income of less than Rs1 lakh are getting free IIT under-graduate education and those belonging to families with annual income of less than Rs5 lakh are getting a waiver of 66% of the total fee.

IITs also want this to be reviewed as free and discounted education is impacting their financials adversely and giving the false impression that the fee hike at the under-graduate level has improved their financial condition. The IITs are set to demand that the HRD ministry should compensate the fee waiver component or do away with it by making loan facility smoother for every category of students.

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