The Hindu Business Line : `We don't want IIMs to be mere appendages of Govt'

"THE IIM student community has never demanded a fee reduction. We are willing to pay for excellent facilities like the highly favourable student-faculty ratio, well-equipped libraries and IT facilities which we are privy to. We are deeply concerned by the HRD Ministry's one-sided moves," Mr Balpreet Singh, a student of the Indian Institute of Management, said.

Despite the Human Resources Development Ministry's moves to slash the IIM fees by close to 80 per cent ostensibly to reduce the burden on the student community, most of the students that Business Line contacted, opposed the move.

"Most of the student community at IIMs are from the middle-class background and as much as 80 to 90 per cent of them avail themselves of educational loans from banks to complete their education. Yet, none of us have ever complained of high fee structure. None of the earlier students have found difficulty in re-paying their loans and we do not expect to either," Mr Deepak Balachandran, another IIM student, who has availed himself of educational loan from a bank, told Business Line.

Most of the students who did not avail themselves of educational loans had previous work experience and had built up a small corpus to tide over the expenses of their education.

The student community whom Business Line contacted felt that the moves to slash the fee burden and enhance the subsidy were done with the intention of gaining greater administrative power and would eventually infringe on the autonomy of their educational institution.

They said that they would rather pay higher tuition fees and ensure the total independence of the educational institution in all policy matters, rather than pay less fees and sacrifice the autonomy of their alma mater.

They did not want the IIMs to become mere appendages of the Government.

The students pointed out that to the best of their knowledge, none of the students have failed to join the institute for want of funds. In fact, banks have been quite proactive and forthcoming with their loans. Within half an hour of the loan application, the loans have been sanctioned and the cheques used to come at periodic intervals, some of the students said.

With a track record of highly lucrative job offers, there has never been any case of default on repayment either, the students said. However, some of the students have opted for longer repayment duration because of the in-built income-tax waiver for some of these loans.

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