Delhi: IIMC alumni condemns fee hike

New Delhi: Over 100 former students of Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) have written to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry condemning the over 100 per cent fee hike within a span of 10 years and demanding a rollback.

Students at the IIMC had begun an agitation last week over fee hike. As many as 120 alumni of the institute wrote to the secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I and B), expressing solidarity with the protesting students. The secretary, Ministry of I and B, is also the chairman of the IIMC Society which governs the institute.

A copy of the letter has also been sent to the Director General of IIMC. The fee increase by over 100 per cent across journalism courses and regional language courses, respectively, in a decade is staggering by the standards of any government-run institute in India, the former students said in the latter.

The IIMC, in a statement issued on December 8, said it is not a "funded institute" but the website of the institute says it is very much so. It is "utterly shocking" to learn that IIMC has turned from being an institute funded by the government to one which has to generate a third of the fund from internal revenue, the alumni said.

Not only this change has come without adequate discussion among all stakeholders but also the institute's website still fails to enlist such crucial information for the perusal of citizens of India, they said.

"Such a move is bound to move the institute away from catering to the masses. May we also recall that at an executive council meeting a decade ago it was decided that course fees would be increased by 10 per cent every year.

"While that itself, to our mind, is unreasonable, the increases in fees between 2018-19 and 2019-20 are way above that level: 27 per cent for language journalism courses, 17 per cent for advertising and 16 per cent for all other courses," the letter said.