Indore : The Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya (DAVV) is entertaining thoughts of increasing fees of courses offered by the university teaching departments from session 2016-17.
“We have to increase our income to fill various vacant teaching posts and new posts sanctioned by the State Government under self-financing scheme. So, we are contemplating fee hike of courses offered by the university teaching departments,” said Registrar RD Musalgaonkar.
He said that the university would shortly seek proposals from heads of teaching departments for fee hike.
The registrar signaled that fees of about 15 teaching departments of 27 on the UTD campus could be increased.
“Our target will be those teaching departments where fee structures have not been revised in last four five years,” Musalgaonkar said.
Fees some teaching departments have been hiked up to 10 per cent in 2014 after a lull of three years.
The university used to increase fee annually by 10 per cent every year till 2010. But, the practice had to be shelved in 2011 due to protests by student unions. Last year, the DAVV constituted a committee led by School of Biotechnology head Anil Kumar directing it to go through the fee structures of other universities, course-wise, and accordingly give its recommendations.
The idea was to ‘rationalise’ fee structures. The committee reportedly found that the fee structures of the DAVV, course-wise, are lower than that of other universities in the state and subsequently suggested hiking the fees.
“Tuition fee is the main source of income of the DAVV. If we will not increase the fee on regular intervals, we may face financial crisis,” the registrar said adding that the university would hike course fee after every two years.
DAVV to fill about 420 posts
The DAVV needs huge funds to pay salaries of about 400 posts which it has planned to fill in next one year. “We have to fill 253 non-teaching posts under self-financing schemes sanctioned by the government and nearly 170 teaching posts lying vacant in the university teaching departments,” the registrar said adding that to pay salary of these people we need to increase our income and fee hike is the only way out.
