By Prashant K. Nanda
New Delhi, April 13 (IANS) The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow will not join the rest of the IIM fraternity in massively hiking course fee. “We have already increased the fee by just Rs.50,000 and no other review of the decision will take place this year. We are not in a race to hike the course fee,” said J.J. Irani, chairman of the board of governors at IIM Lucknow.

“We are not in a position to comment on the other IIMs’ fee structure. But one thing is for sure, IIM Lucknow will not increase the fee further,” Irani, who is also director of Tata Sons Ltd, told IANS here.

IIM Lucknow now charges Rs.250,000 per year for its two-year MBA course.

From the new academic session in June-July, candidates have to pay Rs.1.15 million in IIM Ahmedabad, an increase of over 100 percent over the previous years. Likewise, a candidate has to cough up Rs.800,000 to study in IIM Bangalore. Both the institutes revised their fee structure twice within a gap two months.

Devi Singh, director of IIM Lucknow, said that the institute has already invested in improving infrastructure and hence is ready to implement reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) from the coming academic year.

“IIM Lucknow has invested Rs.600 million in building new infrastructure over the last few years and will face no difficulty in rolling out reservations in a phased manner,” he said.

The central government has decided to increase the student intake by 54 percent to accommodate a 27 percent quota for OBCs. The authorities have clearly said they will increase the seats so that the share of general category students in seats does not shrink in institutes of higher learning.

The number of students in the flagship MBA programme has increased from 240 in 2004 to 330 in 2008. The institute is also ready to take 45 to 50 more students if the human resource development ministry asks it to implement the reservation for OBCs.

Ruling out a question whether the increased intake would lead to overcrowded classes and a bigger gap in the teacher-student ratio, Singh said: “At max our class size will be 60. In many top foreign institutions, the student-teacher ratio is around 80:1.”

Speaking on the price hike in other IIMs, 55-year-old Singh said: “We are concerned about our students. We are charging much less compared to the majority of our IIMs but the student intake is the highest at IIM Lucknow.”

Currently, India has six IIMs and the seventh IIM will start operation from the coming academic session at Shillong, Meghalaya.

(Prashant Nanda can be contacted Prashant.n@ians.in)