Mumbai On a day when the medical counselling committee (MCC) started counselling for postgraduate medical seats, nearly three months after results for National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for postgraduate students was released, an association of unaided private medical institutes in Maharashtra have approached the Maharashtra government to either drop the recently introduced 50% fee fixation diktat, or allow subsidies.
In a statement on Thursday, the Association of Managements of Unaided Private Medical and Dental Colleges of Maharashtra (AMUPMDC) has shared the annual expenditure and budget of four Maharashtra government-run medical institutes and compared it with the fees of private medical institutes to highlight the losses that colleges will incur if forced to implement the fee diktat.
“As per the budget books presented by the state government, a GMC in Maharashtra spends anywhere between ₹30 to ₹45 lakhs on a student every year, but they charge only ₹1 lakh as tuition fees because the rest of the expenses are met by the government. In case of unaided private colleges, with no government funds backing us up, allotting 50% seats on the fees of a GMC will leave our colleges running into losses,” said Kamal Kishore Kadam, chairman of the Mahatma Gandhi Mission Institute of Health Sciences, and president of AMUPMDC.
He added that the government subsidies nearly 95-97% cost of medical education in government colleges whereas in unaided private colleges, all the expenses are met by the institutes themselves.
In February this year, the National Medical Commission (NMC) issued guidelines for private medical colleges to offer 50% of their seats to students at fees charged by government medical colleges. In the last week of July, NMC released another memorandum stating that these guidelines will be applicable to deemed-to-be institutes as well and that it will be implemented from academic year 2022-23 itself.
Most colleges were unhappy with this move, prompting some deemed medical institutes in Tamil Nadu to approach the Madras high court (HC) challenging a fee fixation memorandum. The Madras HC ordered NMC to reconsider this fee fixation memorandum in the light of negative problems raised by deemed-to-be as well as private medical colleges owing to collection of low fees from 50% students.
“When we questioned the NMC about the fee fixation diktat, they asked us to charge more from students who will apply for the other 50% seats. But, how is that fair? It is also against the law. We demand that the state or central government either pull back this NMC memorandum, or start giving monetary grants to medical colleges to save us from incurring losses,” said another member of AMUPMDC.
Last month, college heads from private and deemed medical colleges from across Maharashtra approached the union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya and urged him to look into the matter. They are now planning to reach out to the Supreme Court for clarity.
