NEW DELHI, APRIL 21: The Government has once again stepped in to stall the IIM fee hike, prompting the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) to call for an emergency meeting of the Governing Council, its apex decision-making body, on April 26. A decision to rollback the hike is expected to be taken in the meeting, top sources told The Indian Express.

The HRD Ministry-appointed review committee will visit IIMA on April 25 after it has raised objections against the fee hike.

This comes almost three weeks after IIMA chairman Vijaypat Singhania met HRD minister Arjun Singh and got the fee hike proposal endorsed on April 2 after announcing a 20-fold increase in scholarships.

On April 4, the Ministry’s higher education secretary R P Agrawal and senior officials had a meeting with the members in the Review committee for IIMs, headed by Maruti Udyog chairman R C Bhargava, where a single-page interim report was received.

This report, accessed by The Indian Express, said that “one of the terms of reference of the committee is to review the per student cost on various courses being offered by the institutes and to suggest guidelines for proportionate recovery of this cost from student fees, government grants, interest income from corpus fund.”

It further says, “the committee notes that the IIM Ahmedabad had decided to increase the fee for the post graduate programme in management from Rs 3 lakh per annum to Rs 5.5 lakh per annum.”

“As the committee is still discussing and examining the issue of students’ fee and several other substantive related matters, it recommends to the Government of India to ask all the IIMs to defer any increase in fee and keep it at the level of December 2007 (at Rs 3 lakh or as the case may be) till such time as the committee submits its final report to the government,” the report said. This was then forwarded to Singhania by the HRD Ministry on April 7.

Following this communication from the HRD ministry, IIMA has called a governing body meeting where it has put the issue of “IIM fee hike in lieu of the interim report of the Review committee” on its agenda.