Parents flay govt's decision to hike MBBS fee

Patiala, July 21 (UNI) The parents of a large number of medical aspirants, in a meeting here today, flayed the government decision to implement a fee hike.

The state government was in the process of revising fee structure for MBBS and BDS courses, the entrance test for which has already been conducted and the merit list drawn.

The medical education department has called the meeting for fee revision on July 23 at Chandigarh.

The parents have said that with this decision, the career of medical aspirants was now in a jeopardy as the PMET was already conducted too late and the counselling in other streams was over .

The students have left other seats in other universities in the hope of getting admissions to MBBS and BDS courses, they said.

As per the existing fee structure, the government-run MBBS colleges are charging annual fee of around Rs 13,000, while private colleges are charging around Rs 1 lakh annually.

For BDS courses, the government institutions are charging annual fee of around Rs 11,000, while it's Rs 75,000 per annum in private colleges.

There is a separate existing fee structure for NRI candidates and other faculties for BAMS and Bachelor in Homoeopathy course.

The Former deputy chief minister Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, who held charge of the department during the previous Congress regime, had also said the fee hike should not be announced at this stage as a large number of candidates would fail to take admission.

She has suggested that rather than putting burden on students, the state government should contribute some funds to bail colleges out of financial crisis.

They said that if Government still wanted to hike the fee structure it should have announced it much earlier so that they could have explored other options.

Now the decision should be deferred for at least one year, they said.

UNI