All Maharashtra professional colleges can now charge 3x fees for management, 5x for NRI seats

In a major announcement, the Maharashtra Fee Regulating Authority (FRA) has permitted all the professional colleges under the higher education, technical colleges, and agricultural departments to charge substantially higher fees for management and NRI quota seats.

Maharashtra colleges offering engineering, pharmacy, management, law, teacher training, architecture, and agricultural courses will now be allowed to charge three times the regular fee for management seats and five times for NRI quota seats for both undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) programmes.

Until now, all students enrolled in UG and PG programmes paid the same fee regardless of the quota.

With this move, the fee regulating authority has extended the differential fee policy, which was already in place for health science medical colleges, and other professional institutions. In an effort to bring uniformity in fee structure, the state has reduced the maximum allowable fees for management quota seats in PG Health Science courses from four times the regular fees to three times; in line with the UG Health Science programme.

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The decision came at a FRA meeting in April this year, whose minutes were made public only recently. The move follows a recommendation made in a meeting chaired by the state higher and technical education minister earlier this year in February. The state has a combined 20% management and NRI quota for technical courses, and 20% management quota for agriculture programmes, the statement read.

According to the previous norms, notified by FRA in November 2023, it allowed a maximum of three times the regular fees from the students admitted under the management quota and five times from Non-Resident Indian (NRI) quota candidates for various UG health science programmes, including MBBS, BDS, BAMS, BHMS and BUMS.

The allowance for PG programmes is four times and five times, for institute and NRI quotas respectively. While there's a 15% combined quota for the two categories in UG courses, as many as 35% and 15% PG seats are reserved for management and NRI candidates respectively.