NEW DELHI: The country’s premier technology institutes, the IITs , have urged the government to replace the policy of providing fee exemption for special category students with direct reimbursements by the government to such students, and replace fee waiver with interest free loans to economically weaker students.The cost incurred on such students is "adversely affecting the financial viability of the institutions and eroding their corpus funds", Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) said in a recommendation made to the government."We are not against the policy and the social welfare decision taken on fee waivers… We are just pleading with the government to reimburse the gap," said Indranil Manna, director at IIT-Kanpur IIT-Kanpur hosted the 155th meeting of all IIT directors that unanimously decided to send these proposals to the IIT Council — the apex coordination body for all the 16 IITs chaired by the union HRD minister.IITs have recommended to the HRD ministry that wherever the government decides to give free education to any category of students, the cost of education for these students must be reimbursed to IITs. This can be done through the DBT (direct benefit transfer) system where HRD ministry or the ministry of social justice & empowerment fund students to pay IIT fees."Currently, 48.5% students at IIT undergraduate level don’t pay fee and in fact receive merit scholarships from us. All we are saying is that the government and the relevant department should bear its cost and, in fact, directly address the issue with the student and the bank," Manna told ET. The HRD ministry had earlier this year announced a fee hike across IITs to Rs 2 lakh per year from Rs 90,000 starting 2017. The institutes said the fee hike will be offset by the concessions.At present IITs provide complete exemption of tuition fee for SC/ST and physically disadvantaged students besides interest subvention on educational loans for all students whose annual household income does not exceed Rs 9 lakh for a period of five years. All this cost, including interest subventions, is borne by IITs through their internal accruals.For economically disadvantaged students, the IIT have recommended ‘only interest free loans’ rather than full or partial fee waiver as is the current policy and replacing the 5-year interest subvention period with a 4-year one to coincide with the completion of the undergraduate course at IITs.They have also recommended that the existing meritcum-scholarship schemes should be strengthened to provide scholarship to all eligible students from economically weaker sections. Directors from 15 IITs attended the Kanpur meeting held on December 12.