High Court balm for students joining private medical colleges

Hyderabad: Parents of medical students pursuing MBBS study in different private medical colleges in Telangana can heave a sigh of relief henceforth. They are likely to be spared from spending extra bucks as the High Court termed collection of tuition fee for 5 years by private medical colleges as illegal and unconstitutional.

According to Regulation 7(1) of Medical Council of India's Regulations on Graduate Medical Education 1997, the academic MBBS course is of four-and-a-half years spread over nine semesters excluding the one year compulsory internship.

Accordingly, government medical colleges have been collecting tuition fees for only four-and-a-half years.

However, the situation is different when it comes to private medical colleges.

Although the course duration is of four-and-a-half years, they have been collecting fees for full five years, which means students are being made to shell out fee for extra six months.

While those joining in convener quota are being impacted to some extent (here the tuition fee is Rs 60,000 per year), students enrolling under management and NRI quota are feeling the pinch.

The annual tuition fee is in the range of Rs 11 lakh to Rs 26 lakh per year depending on the category.

If an additional six-month fee is collected then each student has to pay Rs 5.5 lakh to Rs 13 lakh to the college administration, which is a big amount by any stretch of imagination.

A student, who applied online counselling in 2018 filed a writ petition in the High Court in July 2018 and after hearing the arguments, the High Court gave its judgment on January 8, 2020 in which it faulted the Telangana Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee (TAFRC) and the Health department for allowing private colleges to collect fee for five years while MCI rules clearly point out to MBBS study as a four-and-a-half years course.

NIMS Resident Doctors Association president Dr G Srinivas stated that the excess fee collection for six months by private medical colleges was brought to the notice of previous Health Minister C Laxma Reddy in 2016.

Backing the Court's decision, he felt students joining private medical colleges stand to gain immensely from it.