NEW DELHI: Close to the heels of the government clearing a 125 per cent fee hike for IIT undergraduate programmes, the tuition fees of National Institute of Technology (NIT) is also set to rise, a final call of which is expected soon. In October last year, the NIT council had proposed a fee hike from `70,000 to `1.25 lakh-1.4 lakh.
Officials in the HRD Ministry on Friday indicated that the hike was imminent. HRD Minister Smriti Irani is expected to take a call soon on the proposed increase. A hike can also be expected for programmes offered by Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research. The hike, the officials said, was in line with a new funding model where the entire running costs of the publicly funded institutes would be recovered from students. The government will bear the capital expenditure for infrastructure creation, labs, equipment and research.
Meanwhile, even as the steep hike in the IITs are yet to sink in among a larger section of the students, officials made it clear that the hike in fees is also applicable to students who have already enrolled for the B.Tech programme. The Ministry had on Thursday cleared a proposal to hike the tuition fee of these prestigious institutes from `90,000 to `2 lakh. Along with this, it also approved the other proposal to scrap the weightage given to class XII board exams for calculating the JEE scores for admission to IITs and NITs. The changes were effected in keeping with the recommendation of an expert committee headed by IIT-Roorkee chairman Ashok Misra.