With hardly five days to go before admissions close on August 5, students have been directed not to pay any extra fee demanded by professional colleges. They are to pay only the fees prescribed by the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA).
Further, the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) has threatened colleges with disaffiliation if they are found charging extra fees and violating government guidelines.
Higher Education Principal Secretary Rajneesh Goel told Express: “Students should not pay any extra fees now. A committee has been set up to look into the demand for extra fees. Colleges that wish to charge more than the CET fee will have to provide expenditure statements to the new committee, which should approve. If not, it can take action against colleges.”
The new Karnataka State Professional Colleges Admission Monitoring Committee, headed by former Karnatak University Vice-Chancellor S K Saidapur, is authorised to receive complaints on extra fees. It will decide whether students need to pay what their respective colleges are demanding.
The previous committee under P Venkataramaiah classified colleges under three categories of those that could charge extra fees up to Rs 20,000, Rs 15,000 or Rs 10,000. “But the government never accepted the recommendations,” Goel said.
So the government has not put up the extra fees that each college is permitted to charge on its website as announced earlier. This has opened the flood gates for students to be fleeced.
A Pharm-D student was asked to pay close to Rs1 lakh when she reported to Karavali College of Pharmacy, Mangalore on Tuesday morning. “The college asked me to pay close to Rs 1 lakh, whereas the CET fee is just Rs 9,000. I even have the allotment order from the KEA which clearly states that I don’t need to pay more than the CET fee,” said Farzana (name changed).
However, college authorities justified their demand. “A Pharm-D course is equal to MBBS. We need students to pay that much as we offer them many services, and the CET fee is simply not enough,” said Santhosh, the college’s administrative officer.
RGUHS Vice-Chancellor K S Sriprakash said on affiliated colleges charging extra fees: “We will certainly take action within our purview, but we will need students to come forward and give us complaints.”
Meanwhile, as many as 422 seats surrendered by candidates to the KEA were added to the engineering seat matrix for the second extended round on Wednesday, taking the total number of available seats to 9,198 (including 8,776 vacant seats). The results of the second extended round allotment would be uploaded on the KEA website www.kea.kar.nic.in by Wednesday evening.