A team from Delhi that has been in Jadavpur University to assess whether its departments are maintaining the standards set by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) questioned the university authorities on why its fees were so low.
The five-member team visiting the departments of computer science and engineering, and electronics and telecommunication engineering, raised the question in the presence of the new interim vice-chancellor while going through data on students’ strength and resource generation.
The team is at the university on behalf of the National Board of Accreditation (NBA).
Tuition fees in JU were last raised in 2000.
Officiating vice-chancellor Bhaskar Gupta told The Telegraph: “JU has a legacy of supporting underprivileged students. We cannot commercialise everything. However, it cannot be denied at the same time the university cannot continue with the fee structure set in 2000. We need to be innovative and explore whether fees based on family income could be started so those who can afford to pay a moderately enhanced fee while sparing the underprivileged.”
During the initial presentation on academic and financial affairs on Friday, pro-VC Amitava Datta informed the team about the low fees at the university.
“On Saturday while going through the data on students’ strength and income generation in committee room number 1, members of the team asked why the fees are so low in Jadavpur University,” said a JU official.
The team takes stock of infrastructure, resources, and administrative practices while assessing whether its departments are maintaining the standards set by the AICTE.
JU last year agreed to get itself accredited after the university authorities realised that central funding for projects in the engineering faculty could be stalled in the absence of the accreditation.
The fact that engineering graduates won’t get jobs in the Gulf countries, which recognise degrees only if the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) approves the courses, also prompted the JU to seek accreditation,
Referring to the issue of low fees, JU’s finance officer Gourkrishna Pattanayak in a newsletter on Management of finance in acute dearth of resources in the state-aided universities published in September 2022 presented a table that shows the monthly tuition fees in the arts, science and engineering faculties were ₹75, 150 and 200 a month respectively. The monthly hostel fee is ₹25.
In the same newsletter, Pattanayak had written JU was facing an acute scarcity of resources and facilities for academic development and the only option left for “resource generation” was increasing the fees.
The fees, he wrote in the article, are the “lowest across all universities and institutes in the country”.