MADURAI
A section of students from Madurai Kamaraj University College (MKUC) here boycotted classes and assembled inside the campus on Tuesday as a mark of protest against the significant increase of examination fee by Madurai Kamaraj University (MKU) for the first year students of all its affiliated non-autonomous colleges.
According to the students, the fee has been hiked twice in a span of last six months. While the examination fee for every paper was increased by 20 % earlier this year for students in all the years, it has now been increased by another 41 % for first year students.
An official from the university acknowledged that the fee was initially revised from ₹ 65 to ₹ 78 per paper for all the students and now from ₹ 78 to ₹ 110 per paper (for first year students alone).
“The first year students will continue to pay ₹ 110 as they move into second and third years,” the official said.
With first year students having six papers per semester and the second and third year students having roughly eight papers every semester, the students opined that the examination fee will be a significant burden on them.
“I have to pay ₹ 660 per semester now and ₹ 880 when I move to second year. If I unfortunately have arrears, I have to even more. I am the first one to attend college in my family and my father is an agricultural labourer. It is unfair that they charge such a significant fee in a government institution,” said a first year student doing business administration course.
P. Murugesan, an Associate Professor from the Department of Business Administration at the college, said that such a sharp increase within a short span of time was an injustice to the students, considering their socio-economic background.
“Even many of the autonomous colleges do not charge this much. The examination fee charged by most other State universities are also less,” he said, adding that the university has also marginally increased the fee for issuance of marksheets.
O. Ravi, Controller of Examination, MKU, however, defended the hike by saying that the costs involved had gone up significantly and the revised fee was not more than what is charged by a few institutions like Manonmaniam Sundaranar University.
“We had not increased the fee for more than five years. The decision to hike the fee in two stages was taken earlier this year,” he said.
He assured that the increase in the fee will help in improving the efficiency and consequently avoid unnecessary delays in publication of results.
