Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad which recently announced three fold increase in its fee has come out with a free education scheme. Any student whose parents earn less than Rs one lakh a year will have free education. He will not have to pay any tuition fee nor any other expense for books and other teaching material.

Giving details of the tuition fee waiver scheme, IIMA Director Samir Barua said that the management expected 15 to 20 students in this category. To a question, Barua clarified that there was no restriction on the number of students under the free education category. All those who qualified the criteria of income below Rs one lakh would get complete tuition fee and other expense waiver.

Describing the idea as innovative, Barua said that there will be graded waiver of the tuition fee of students having annual income upto Rs six lakh. He claimed that the graded waiver scheme will benefit 65 per cent of the 260 students of the basic two year course. IIMA recently raised the fee of the course to Rs.11.5 lakh. The IIM is expected to spend Rs eight crore per year on the waiver scheme.

To help student deal with the problem of payment of fee, the IIMA is negotiating with banks to offer students education loan at attractive interest rate without collateral security and moratorium.He was confident that banks would soon come out with right package for the students. Barua clarified that the fee for the existing batch would remain unchanged.

Defending the steep rise in the fee, Barua said that it was to cover impact of inflation and recent pay hike. He said that the fee of Rs11.5 lakh was 100 per cent recovery of the expenses. But this full fee will be recovered from 35 per cent students only since the rest 65 per cent would get benefit of graded waiver of tuition fee.

To another question, Barua said that earlier there was need based scholarship and now it was tution fee waiver. Student is not made to pay the waived amount. Earlier IIMA used to spend upto Rs. 40 lakh under the need based scholarship scheme while the graded waiver would cost IIMA Rs eight crore.

He agreed that compensation package for the faculty was also a major problem. However, it was not in the purview of the management to decide on it as government fixed it.

Source by gujaratglobal.com