Excess fees: AICTE to take punitive action against erring colleges

Hyderabad: The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) put in place a series of norms with punitive action against the technical institutions charging excess fees than what was fixed.

The new guidelines insist that all technical education institutions should mandatorily display on their websites all fees, like tuition fees, examination fees and others to be collected from the students transparently and adhere to the same. The details should be displayed ahead of the admission of the students each academic year.

Following the new norms, the technical educational institutions are barred from collecting any additional fees other than the fee fixed by the State government or the State Fee Regulatory Committees. The apex technical education regulator said failing to adhere to the new norms would invite punitive actions against the erring technical institutions.

The actions include repaying twice the total fee collected per student and the excess fee collected has to be refunded to the student.If the college was permitted to admit NRI students and approved to create supernumerary seats, then the same would be suspended for one academic year. Apart from that, reduction of approved intake, no admission status in one or more courses for one academic year, withdrawal of approval from programmes and courses and recognition to the institution and declaring the institution not eligible to receive any grants from AICTE was contemplated against the erring institutions.