DoTE officials conduct raids at 142 colleges in TN

Chennai, July 30 (UNI) Continuing its crackdown on self-financing colleges over collection of excess capitation fee, more than 80 teams of Department of Technical Education (DoTE) headed by Deans of government engineering colleges today conducted suprise raids in about 142 colleges across Tamil Nadu.

Official sources said seven teams carried out raids in about 12 institutions situated in and around Chennai and neighbouring Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur districts.

During the raids, the teams gathered substantial evidence about excess fees collection in these colleges.

The DoTE teams fanned out to various parts of the state and conducted raids, following continuous complaints that the private colleges were collecting exorbitant fees more than the one prescribed by the government.

There were also complaints that private colleges were collecting exorbitant capitation fees.

Meanwhile, State Higher Education Minister K Ponmudy said all government universities could start engineering courses to curb this menace. However, he did not elaborate further stating that the idea was only in its preliminary stage.

It may be recalled that a couple of days ago, acting on complaints from students, special teams from DoTE raided two self-financing colleges, including the Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering managed by the SPIC foundation and St Josephs College of Engineering of Jeppiar Trust and had found substantial evidence against them for collecting excess fees.

It may be noted that political parties including PMK, a key ally providing outside support to the DMK government, had come out strongly against exorbitant fee collection by self-financing colleges and had demanded action against the erring colleges.

UNI