Fiscal imbalance: Students pay the price

MUMBAI: A 12-year-old private medical college in Navi Mumbai is due to be inspected by the Medical Council of India (MCI) on June 18. The institute lacks a 500-bed hospital, essential equipment and a qualified faculty—mandatory requirements for any medical college.
But it is confident that it will manage an ‘all’s well’ certificate from the MCI team.According to the rules, the MCI has to give the college notice before it arrives for an inspection. The management has clearly mastered how to bend it like Beckham.
“As long as the staff and equipment is there on the day of the inspection, who cares about the remaining 364 days?’’ said an angry staff member. Since the mid-eighties, private medical and engineering colleges have been churning out graduates who have rarely examined patients or developed computer programmes.
The managements of such colleges have converted their general hospitals into dental hospitals overnight to meet dental college norms before an inspection. Likewise, engineering colleges share equipment, shunting circuits and computers from one institute to another to pass muster with the All India Council of Technical Education.
“What else do you expect when the government has, for all these years, forced us to charge fees much lower than the actual costs?’’ reasoned an engineering college trustee. In practice, private professional colleges made good the difference by charging socalled capitation fees, a large percentage of which was undeclared. Few college managements used even a fraction of the huge surplus to improve their facilities.
An October 2002, a supreme court order that allowed private colleges to fix their own fees was hailed by such colleges as the best prescription for the ills plaguing higher education. The managements made their calculations on what they claimed were actual costs, pegging the four-year engineering degree at Rs 2 lakhs and the four-and-ahalf-year MBBS degree at anything between Rs 10 lakhs and Rs 15 lakhs.
Managements also have the right to sell percentage of seats at a premium. However, eight months after the SC judgment, this prescription is being bitterly contested and the Bombay high court has been asked to resolve the vexed question of how much control the government can exercise over unaided colleges. The court has expressed concern about colleges inflating the fees almost four-fold.
The stakes are high in Maharashtra which—with 137 private engineering and 16 private medical colleges—has more privately run professional colleges than any state except Karnataka. The fact that many of these institutes are run by the very politicians who sit on committees and frame the rules hasn’t helped matters.