Karnataka Govt to fix Medical, Engineering courses fees soon

The delay by the State government in deciding on the fee structure and seat-sharing matrix for admission to professional colleges CET & ComedK has irked private Medical & Engineering colleges.

The Karnataka government is on implementing the provisions of a 2006 law to regulate admission and determine the fee structure in private medical, dental and engineering colleges.

At present, government is going by an agreement under which the fees are fixed by the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA), which conducts Common Entrance Test (CET) for professional courses, the ComedK and managements.

If suppose, Congress government goes back to adopt the provisions under the Karnataka Professional Educational Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Determination of Fee) Act, 2006, then there will be no ComedK quota.

The fees for a general merit student or for a student falling under the reservation category will be uniform, but it will be different for each college.

The State, in 2011, set aside the recommendation of the B Padmaraj committee on the fixing of fees because the government had found that fees for students of the government quota would go up considerably.

The committee report was never made public. The government was not in favour of making meritorious students or those falling under reservation to pay higher fees. It was also not ready to take the burden of paying the additional fees on behalf of students.

The State government was supposed to take a final decision on the seat-sharing matrix and fee structure by April 10. Till now Govt has not taken any decision on the fee structure.

But, it was said that the maximum tuition fee for a premier engineering college could be around Rs 1.25 lakh while the minimum was Rs 30,000. Now, for the merit quota and reservation quota, the fees is much lower than the committee's recommendation.

Panduranga Setty, secretary, KUPECA, said, "Colleges will take the Consortium of Medical, Engineering and Dental Colleges of Karnataka (ComedK) or the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) scores and go ahead with the admission as the government does not seem to be bothered about our concerns. Each institution will charge a fee based on the costs incurred by the management per student."