Adding up the tribulations of the coronavirus pandemic, the Karnataka government has increased the fees for postgraduate medical seats in private colleges by 20-30 per cent. The decision follows the state government's earlier order to the private schools in the states to forbid from their decision of hiking school fees for this year.
Fee hike hits the students
The Medical Education department of the state, on Thursday, April 30, announced its decision to hike the college fees, for both medical and dental PG courses for 2020-21.
According to the order, the fees for both the PG courses under institutional quota have been increased by 30%. The same has been hiked by 20% for the government quota seats available at the private medical and dental colleges across the state.
The fee hike for government quota seats in deemed universities is 20%. However, there is no change in the fees in government medical colleges.
Fee hike mandatory
According to the sources, the fee hike was inevitable and mandatory as both dental and medical college managements claimed that they would not be able to meet the infrastructure requirements this year with the previous amount of fees.
In addition to this, the managements also found it difficult to pay salaries to their staff if there were not allowed to increase the fees.
The new fees mentioned on the website include Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) admission fee, while last year's fee cited in this report excludes it.
The fee hike has been a huge blow to the students' family who are hit badly due to the consequent coronavirus economy fall.
It costs around Rs 7.1 lakh per year for a government seat in a private college in Karnataka. While, a private seat in a private college charges Rs 11.5 lakh a year. This differs according to the branches viz. anatomy, physiology, microbiology, forensic medicine among others.
