Free education may go

After cutting down IIIT seats by half, the state government is now looking at restructuring the ‘fee reimbursement scheme’, another pet scheme of the late Chief Minister Dr Y.S. Rajashekar Reddy.

The government says it can no longer afford to pay the fees of so many students given its lack of resources, and has imposed strict norms of eligibility. Under the existing scheme, any student whose annual family income is less than Rs 1 lakh can enrol in various professional courses free of cost.

The government has allotted Rs 2,500 crore in the budget for the scheme in the current academic year to cover the fees of 20 lakh students in about 15,000 colleges. However, it has released only Rs 913 crore so far due to financial constraints.

The government asked the Group of Ministers (GoM) that handled the IIIT issue to review the fee reimbursement scheme.