IIMs for status quo in fee structure

Even as all the six Indian Institutes of Management have been slated to meet here on this Sunday to draft a Common Fee Charter following advise from Union Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh, it has been reliably learnt that the institutes are primarily of the opinion of maintaining status quo in the fee structure and similar is the opinion of most of the Faculty Councils of the IIMs. 
 
On Tuesday evening, a meeting of the Faculty Council of IIM-Ahmedabad took place, in which faculty members also opined about strengthening the existing Need Based Scholarship (NBS) Scheme with additional funds to provide educational facilities in the IIMs even for the poor and needy students, qualified in Common Admission Test. 
 
"With the minister asking the institutes to work out a uniform fee structure, naturally none of the IIMs will be ready to lose revenue even though three of the six IIMs including Board of IIM-Calcutta, IIM-Lucknow and IIM-Kozikode have decided earlier to implement the fee cut order of the earlier ministry. Primarily it seems that all the IIMs are on the opinion of maintaining status quo of the fees for the Post-Graduate Programme while also enhancing NBS Scheme for the poor and needy students which will ensure no structured fees system for students coming from various financial backgrounds," said a source close to IIM-A. 
 
It has been reliably learnt that in the meeting of all six directors of the IIMs on June 6, the Institutes may come out with the Charter of maintaining status quo in the fees as IIM-A and IIM-B already decided to do that while IIM-Indore had decided to wait till the Supreme Court finalised the pending Public Interest Litigation. 
 
"The reason for convening another round of board meeting of the institutes before the final meeting with the minister is to take decision on the fees for the new academic session due this June-July and before that all the six directors will try to be agreed on this point," said a source in IIM-C,

which however decided in favour of fee cut while its Faculty Council approached Kolkata High Court against its own board's decision to implement fee cut. 
 
While the IIMs are almost anonymous over the issue of maintaining fees of the last academic session even for the new session, it has been learnt that the institutes will try to convey a message to the ministry that even though a status quo would be maintained as far as the fees for PGP students is concerned, no poor students will face problem to meet the expenditure to study in any of the IIMs. 
 
"We have already taken a resolution to enhance the NBS Scheme which will work as the instrument to ensure smooth study process in IIM-A irrespective of his/her financial position. Breaking the convention, this year we have already mentioned the NBS Scheme facilities to every students qualified for studying in IIM-A in their admission letters dispatched recently and a Financial & Aid Committee has already been created to handle such cases," Indira Parikh, Dean of IIM-A told Business Standard on Tuesday. 
 
IIM-A which had disbursed over Rs 25 lakh (Rs 2.5 million) for needy students during the last academic session, is now planning to hike its NBS Scheme corpus and may approach even the alumnis for strengthening funds for NBS Scheme to accommodate more and more students. 
 
"We are even ready to provide 100 percent grant to such students under this scheme and irrespective of numbers of such needy and poor students. Ten years back when the Centre had asked to hike fees to become self-dependent financially, we decided not to make fees a constraint for the students and even today we stand for the cause," added Parikh. 
 
Apart from IIM-A, IIM-B, IIM-C and IIM-L has such schemes and all are planning to strengthening the funds for this purpose while IIM-Kozikode and IIM-I are planning to create such a scheme as they are yet to have and may seek even government funds to create the corpus, said a source.