A government order from the Higher Education Department has upset parents of wards studying in Annamalai University’s medical and dental colleges.
The G.O., signed by the department’s Secretary D. Karthikeyan and issued on Tuesday, has provided the details of fees fixed for MBBS and post-graduate programmes in the Government Medical College and Government Dental College, Cuddalore district for students admitted in 2016-17 onwards.
The order states that students on the university’s roll during the academic year 2020-21 had approached the government and sought to re-fix the fee for PG and UG courses.
Accordingly the department has given a break-up of fees fixed for students admitted since 2016-17. For instance, MBBS students currently doing their Compulsory Rotatory Residential Internship (CRRI) will pay ₹5.44 lakh for the first year and subsequently ₹4 lakh/year. The same rule applies for students admitted in 2017-18.
For those admitted from 2018-19 to 2020-21, the fee has been fixed at ₹4 lakh/year “on a par with self-financing college fees for the entire duration of their study” the order reads.
A similar break-up has been given for dental college students and for PG students. Any excess fee would be refunded to outgoing students or suitably adjusted for junior year students towards fee to be paid in the coming years. In case of CRRIs, if the stipend was paid then it would be recovered as in self-financing colleges no stipend is paid to CRRIs, the G.O. explains.
“The government took over the colleges in 2013, but the fee collected was much higher than even that collected by SF colleges. We, the parents of students from the 2013-14 batch, have been fighting for refund.
“When the fee for self-financing colleges was ₹2.3 lakh to ₹2.8 lakh, we paid ₹4.5 lakh and ₹5.04 lakh as per the (fee fixation) committee’s order, which too we have challenged,” said S. Viswanathan, a parent, who led the legal fight against the higher fees fixed by the committee.
He added that the order had been issued at a time when case was pending with the Madras High Court.
G.R. Ravindranath, general secretary of Doctors’ Association for Social Equality, said the fee fixed by the government is 30 times higher than what is paid at government colleges and three times more than that fixed for SF colleges.
He has urged the government to issue an order that the fee for the students admitted in PG for 2021-24 be on a par with that charged by government colleges only. Similar move is necessary for MBBS students admitted from 2021-22, he said.
