Maharashtra: Karjat Medical College Faces Fee Regulator’s Action

The Maharashtra Fee Regulating Authority (FRA) has pulled up a medical college and a physiotherapy institute in Karjat (Raigad) for failing to obtain its approval for the tuition fees charged during the last three academic sessions.

The FRA has faulted Dr NY Tasgaonkar Institute of Medical Science and Dr NY Tasgaonkar College of Physiotherapy, both managed by Karjat-based Saraswati Education Society, for failing to submit fee proposals for 2021-22, when they began admitting students, as well as for 2022-23 and 2023-24. While the two institutes claimed that they couldn’t get fee approvals on time due to a delay in admissions for their first batch, the FRA has rejected this explanation and summoned the college officials, as well as the chairperson and secretary of their governing body.

The FRA controls fee structure at private unaided professional colleges, including engineering, health sciences, management and law institutes. It determines the maximum chargeable tuition fees for each of the courses at all professional educational institutes in Maharashtra in a given academic year. The fees are calculated after considering the expenditure incurred by the college in the preceding year.

According to the minutes of an FRA meeting held in May, the two institutes had sought the authority’s approval for charging Rs8 lakh and Rs1 lakh as ‘ad-hoc’ fees for MBBS and Bachelor of Physiotherapy (BPth) programmes, respectively, in 2023-24. While the ad-hoc fee is meant for the new courses, the FRA pointed out that the colleges are already functional and have been admitting students since 2021-22. It also noted that the two colleges should have applied for finalisation of ad-hoc fees for 2021-22 and 2022-23, as well as for fixing the regular fees for 2023-24, but failed to do so.

Earlier this year, FRA issued show-cause notices to both the institutes for not meeting the fee fixation norms. In response, the institutes explained that even though they got approval to start from 2021-22, there was a delay in issuance of government resolutions. As a result, the two institutes couldn’t participate in the first two rounds of centralised admissions and could only admit students in the third round. The delay meant that fees for the first academic year couldn’t be levied until 2022-23. 

However, FRA refused to accept this explanation, as it contended that as the two institutes had already admitted students in 2021-22 and charged the ad-hoc fees, they must be in possession of the necessary income and expenditure details for 2022-23. Hence, the colleges could have submitted this information for fixing 2023-24 fees and also finalising the ad-hoc fees of the previous two years. 

Sreeraj SR, the principal of the physiotherapy college, said that he isn’t authorised to talk and instead directed to the Raigad Hospital and Research Centre, the hospital attached to the medical college. Dr Vinayak Sabnis, dean of the medical college, didn’t respond to a call and a message sent by the FPJ.