THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The government and a section of the self-financing engineering college managements are expected to enter into a fresh agreement on fee structure and seat sharing within a month. In the run-up to finalising the agreement, Higher Education Minister R Bindu held talks with representatives of both self-financing as well as autonomous self-financing engineering college management on Wednesday.
The discussions were held with representatives of the Kerala Catholic Engineering College Management Association (KCECMA) that has 14 member colleges and the association representing three autonomous engineering colleges. KCECMA representatives demanded a marginal increase in tuition fees from the present `75,000 for all seats, that was agreed to way back in 2011-12. They pointed out that the government had issued an order in 2019 for periodic revision of tuition fees in government, aided and government-controlled self-financing engineering colleges by 5% every year. However, no such revision was allowed in the case of KCECMA member colleges.
The management representatives also raised the issue of vacant seats in the merit quota in its member colleges for the past many years. They urged the government to earmark at least 10% of the vacant merit seats to students from outside the state, who have not appeared for the state engineering entrance examination but have the marks prescribed by AICTE in the qualifying examination for admission to engineering courses. “The government adopted a favourable approach to most of our demands. Fine details of the agreement will be worked out further and finalised within a month,” said a management association representative.
The management association representing three autonomous self-financing colleges that is set to ink separate agreement with the government, has demanded that autonomous colleges be given the right to admit students to all the seats.