The Admission Supervisory Committee for Professional Colleges in Kerala headed by R. Rajendra Babu has fixed the annual course fee for MBBS courses in 19 self-financing medical colleges in the State.
The newly fixed fee is nearly ₹50,000 more than the fee in the previous years and will range from ₹5.85 lakh to ₹7.19 lakh. The admission process to the medical colleges is slated to take place from July 9.
However, representatives of private self-financing medical college managements expressed their “disappointment” over the committee’s decision. They said the decision was taken without considering the actual costs involved in running the colleges.
“The fee is quite inadequate taking into consideration the expenses involved in running the institution and nowhere near the figures we have submitted. The committee has assumed that if our costs have gone up, we must have made it up by hiking hospital charges. But this is not true. We should have been given an opportunity to explain our case,” a spokesperson for the Kerala Christian Professional College Managements’ Federation said.
“We have proposed a fee of at least ₹8 lakh, so that we can run our institutions. Already, most of the colleges run on huge losses and the fee now fixed by the committee will just force them into closure,” K.M. Navas, president of the Kerala Private Medical College Managements’ Association, said.
The college managements will explore the possibility of legal remedy after consultation, he said.
