In 2001, when the Kerala government decided to introduce self-fi nancing professional colleges, it was claimed that 50 per cent of the seats would be reserved for students on merit and the fees would be the same as that in government colleges. Today, not only have the claims been belied, but the self-fi nancing college (SFC) managements are brazenly cocking a snook at the public, especially the student community.
By charging exorbitant fees for sub standard infrastructure and a nondescript faculty, the state is now witnessing a runaway Frankenstein. Consider the fees: Against `8,000 a year charged by government engineering colleges, SFCs charge `50,000 for the low-income group and `75,000 for others.
In medical education, the government college fee is `25,000 while it is `4.40 lakh in colleges run by Christian managements and up to `2.5 lakh in those by other managements. So, it shouldn’t have come as surprise when Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan reminded the Christian managements on Tuesday, that they too have been bitten by the Mammon bug. If they once imparted education as an end in itself, now it was more a means to commercially tap the market.
For good measure, he added abkari contractors, licensed to sell liquor, too were selling education. But it can’t be forgotten that successive governments have belied the interests of students and both political fronts in Kerala are equally complicit in allowing the education to plumb the pits. Tragically, it has taken a student’s suicide to get the government to introspect on what ails a good number of the state’s 120 SFC engineering colleges. Sure, the public mood is one of anger and outrage.
One is not sure if this is fully justifi ed as the onus for what is wrong is as much on the parents as the college managements. Because, all these years, they seemed least concerned about what their wards had to suffer in these engineering ‘factories’ as long as the assembly line churned out employable products.