Ahmedabad: Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad (IIM-A) will increase fees for its various courses by 5% due to the impact of inflation. It will be the third hike by the premier b-school in the past three years. With this, the course fee for the institute’s flagship programme will be Rs 14.45 lakh for the batch 2011-13.
For the batch of 2010-2012, the PGP fee stood at Rs 13.7 lakh. It was Rs 11.5 lakh in 2008-10 and was raised to Rs 12.5 lakh in 2009-11. Another important course the institute offers is a one-year programme in management for executives (PGPX), which will now cost Rs 20.31 lakh. It has been increased by about Rs 1 lakh. Samir Barua, IIM-A Director said that they had to hike the fees to meet the increasing cost caused by high inflation. However, this rise is still roughly half the inflation rate.
Besides, the IIMA does not receive government funding to run its programmes because such financing is limited to developing infrastructure for accommodating students under the other backward classes quota. The institute says the expansion of facilities to accommodate OBC students will be completed in 2011-12 for the PGP and 2012-13 for the PGPX.
The new fee structure proposed for various programmes was approved in the meeting of the board of governors on Saturday, just before the 46th convocation presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Sources informed that during the NDA regime in 2003-04, the union HRD ministry under Murli Manohar Joshi had cut fees by almost 80% for the PGP.
However, the earlier fee structure was restored under persuasion from prominent thinkers when Arjun Singh took charge of the ministry after the UPA came to power.
