College students begin new semester with march to HRDD instead of walk to classrooms

DEPARTMENT TRIES TO EXPLAIN FEE HIKE, BUT CANNOT GET THROUGH TO STUDENTS
AMEET OBEROI
GANGTOK, 14 July: Day-One of a new academic year at Sikkim Government College had started with a protest against the fee hike today. The mood, however, offered no inkling of the violence with which the day would end.
Students of the five government colleges of the State [Gangtok, Burtuk, Namchi, Rhenock, Gangtok Law College and Gyalshing] marched up to the HRDD to protest the four-fold hike in their semester fees and gheraoed the Department in protest.
They were demanding that the department roll back the fee hike [something which was eventually done]. The increased fee for a single semester is as follows: Humanities/ Commerce: Rs. 1,200 [earlier Rs. 380]; Physical Education /Statistics- Rs. 1,400; Science /Geography /Mass Communication - Rs. 1,700 [Rs. 500 lab fees].
There was much confusion at the Department which had locked its doors in the face of the strong numbers and high emotions with which the students had arrived. Police mediation urging the students to confer with the department officials in smaller, more manageable numbers were shouted down by the students.
Eventually, a meeting was held between the officials of the Department represented by Special Secretary Ambica Pradhan and Bimal Chandra Rai [SDM, Gangtok] and representatives of the colleges. The meeting however ended inconclusive with the students insistent that the rollback be announced while the officials arguing that it was not for them to make the decision. At best, they could convey their demand, they said.
They invited the students to submit a memorandum detailing their grievances and assured to have it looked into. The students returned unconvinced and the matter took a whole different turn at SGC-Tadong in the evening.
Earlier, clarifying the fee hike, the Director [Higher Education, HRDD], Deepa Basnett informed that this had been on the cards for a while now [not having been changed for three decades now], and had kept getting put away for one reason or the other. This year, the Department finally secured the approval of the government recently.
Interestingly, since the Notification regarding the fee hike had not come out till the start of the academic session at the colleges [today], the prospectus carried a mention that the fees may be subject to increase, she stated.
As for the need for the fee hike, she said that earlier, the funds provided by the government were sufficient to run the colleges as there were fewer colleges and lesser students, but now the numbers have grown substantially and the funds were not sufficient to run the expenses of the colleges, look after the maintenance and repairs and supply the lab equipments that are needed by science students, she said.
Even the colleges had demanded an increase in the fee structure to be able to take better care of their expenses which the department was not able to do for the past many years, she said.
Earlier the department was charging Rs. 90 as tuition fees which has now been increased to Rs. 110 and this is the only amount that goes into the government exchequer the rest of the amount collected is either the college fund of which a certain amount is collected by the University under which the college is affiliated, she informed.
The State government is now also providing the students with a scholarship of Rs. 800 per month to students scoring above 70 per cent and above in their class XII examinations, while children from underprivileged economic backgrounds [whose parents income is less than Rs. 10,000 per month] scoring 50 per cent and above are also liable to receive this post-matric scholarship, she further added.
The Social Welfare Department is also giving a scholarship to the economically backward students and there are some students that are receiving both these scholarships but we have not intervened as these children belong to the state so we have ignored the overlap, she said.
The HRD Department has also started the Social Responsibility Fund from the fees collected from the students and a college management committee has also been constituted to look into which all children need to be given the grants from this fund. Even the students can themselves ask their college heads as to where the money is being spent of being used for, she stated.
The college examination fees was Rs. 50 earlier, which has now been increased to Rs. 200 [Rs. 850 for Science per semester] leaving the fees charged by the colleges for the two internal examinations held in the colleges. So the amount of Rs. 1,200 over the period of six months is not a very big amount to pay by the students, she stated.